
THE YOUNG 
IN HEART 



ARTHUR 
STAN WOOD 
PIER 



t 




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THE YOUNG IN HEART. (A Book of Essays.) Nar- 
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THE YOUNG IN HEART 



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THE YOUNG IN HEART 




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ARTHUR STANWOOD PIER 



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Published April xqoj 



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I. 


CONTE^ 

THE YOUNG IN HEART 




II. 


LAWN TENNIS 




III. 


WORK AND PLAY 




IV. 


THE SMOKING-ROOM 




V. 


CYNICISM 




VI. 


THE QUIET MAN 




VII. 


"IN SWIMMING" 




VIII. 


BRAWN AND CHARACTER 



35 

79 
105 
139 

155 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

Of all the myths and legends which have 
consoled or encouraged mankind, that 
which persisted longest, reappearing at 
intervals through many centuries, to be 
relinquished at last with sad regret, was 
the belief that somewhere was to be found 
an elixir of youth. Some of the more 
socially disposed of the Grecian divinities 
were thought to confer it upon their 
earthly favorites ; and frequently the an- 
cient mind appears to have befogged it- 
self with dreams about the rejuvenating 
properties of vaguely situated rivers and 
fountains. Mediaeval chemists and ex- 
plorers alike made patient search for this 
elixir, so longed for by the race, so hope- 
fully believed in ; the discovery of Amer- 
ica promoted a lapsing credulity. It seemed 
that in the New World, at any rate, would 
come to light the admirable secret which, 

[3] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

in spite of all the poking and prod- 
ding, had never been yielded up by the 
Old. 

No doubt, the ill fate of Ponce de Leon 
dealt the theory its death-blow; at least, 
confidence was never again begotten of 
credulity. That sanguine adventurer, at 
the age of sixty, secured a charter from 
his government to discover and settle the 
island of Bimini, where, it had been re- 
ported to him, the fountain of perpetual 
youth cast its waters wastefully upon the 
earth, — with none but ill-natured savages 
to bathe in it and profit by it. Possibly, in 
making his preparations, he did not suf- 
ficiently consider how formidable might 
be savages who were fortified with per- 
petual youth. No sooner had he set foot 
on the island than these inhospitable and 
virile natives routed his following, and 
gave him the wound from which a short 
time afterwards he died. Thenceforth 
there was no important attempt to de- 
monstrate the existence of a fountain of 

[4] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

youth. In another century the belief had 
faded. 

This enlightenment of the popular mind, 
and this extinction of a popular yearning, 
have freed many wailful and bemoaning 
voices that had otherwise been still, and 
have permitted many minor cadences to 
reach the hitherto oblivious ear. So long 
as a fountain of youth was thought to be 
discoverable, no Disraeli arose to exclaim, 
'' Youth is a blunder ; " no Swinburne 
chanted drearily, — 

" From too much love of living, 
From hope and fear set free, 
We thank with brief thanksgiving 

Whatever gods may be, 
That no life lives forever, 
That dead men rise up never, 
That even the weariest river 
Winds somewhere safe to sea." 

One is bound to suspect that they who 
now hold the dismal view of youth and 
life would have been the most eager vol- 
unteers to join Ponce de Leon's expedi- 

[5] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

tion. It is a not wholly unknown or repre- 
hensible habit to declare a low estimate 
on what is out of reach. And it is the 
common failing of diffident humanity to 
imagine that the attainable is out of reach. 

Even nowadays, when superstition has 
hardly a rag left, every man may be, if he 
will, his own Ponce de Leon — and with 
a better prospect of success. For there 
is a fountain of youth; it will be found 
in no undiscovered country — unless that 
country is the man's own heart. There, 
at some time, it has flowed. 

Seven springs feed this fountain, — van- 
ity, emulousness, generosity, anticipation, 
innocence, curiosity, and faith. The first 
early sentience of the child is the rod that 
strikes the rock and releases, one after 
another, these waters. Thenceforth they 
mingle in a clear, harmonious stream. 

But then, in some seismic convulsion or 
plague of drought, one of these springs is 
diminished, or extinguished, or transformed 
into a moody intermittent little geyser. 

[ 6] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

Other shocks follow, and assail youth at its 
remaining sources. Sometimes the springs 
burst up, and spout afresh through the crust 
that has been forming over them ; more 
often their outpouring is reduced and re- 
duced, and the fountain of youth gradu- 
ally perishes away. 

Invariably, the first of the springs to be 
diminished or exhausted, is faith. The pro- 
gress from credulous and superstitious child- 
hood to fearless and open-eyed maturity is 
marked by the remains of defunct delu- 
sions. Some of these had been barely 
warmed to life, and were laid down with- 
out a pang ; but when others, which had 
been of slow and tender incubation, were 
pronounced inanimate, there w^as a sorrow- 
ing heart and childish tears. These inev- 
itable bereavements do not quell the en- 
thusiastic spirit ; but little by little, as they 
accumulate, they shadow its joyousness and 
awaken distrust and suspicion. We sacri- 
fice our delusions without much suffering ; 
it is otherwise when we are called on to 

[ 7] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

yield up our illusions. It caused me as a 
child no great pain to find that a man 
could not keep himself dry in a shower — 
as one of my fairy tales had it — by whirl- 
ing a sword rapidly about his head; I had a 
wooden sword of my own, and when next 
the rain fell I made the experiment and 
was drenched. Probably I had never quite 
believed the story ; at any rate, I was but 
mildly disappointed, and experienced no 
such grief then as befell me somewhat later 
in the overthrow of my first great illusion. 
To publish a book, and thus amaze and 
gratify my family, was my precocious aim. 
Finding, after various efforts, that I had not 
wit enough to make a book of my own, 
and having studied Latin prematurely, I 
conceived the idea of writing out a trans- 
lation of Caesar's Commentaries. This 
laborious task I ultimately accomplished 
— in secret, as I supposed ; I covered some 
seven hundred pages with large puerile 
penmanship, and rendered every ablative 
absolute with slavish fidelity. When the 

[8] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

last word had been written, and nothing 
remained but to arrange for the pubUca- 
tion of the work, I found myself too ig- 
norant of business methods to proceed, 
and I took my father into my confidence. 
His astonishment and his pride in my mass 
of manuscript, the way in which he took 
it up and balanced it in his hands and 
ejaculated reverently over the number of 
pages, exalted me as if it had been the 
printed and bound volume he was holding ; 
and then, as considerately as possible, he 
explained that, on account of the number 
who were in the field before me with 
translations of Caesar, I could hardly hope 
to find a publisher. I was crushed; but 
my father called in my mother, and they 
made me feel that they appreciated my 
colossal achievement, even if the world was 
denied the opportunity. That day my 
father invited me to lunch with him at 
the club, and afterwards took me to a base- 
ball game. So when my first illusion 
broke, I was floated tenderly down to earth. 

[9] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

But for several years afterwards I would 
occasionally pull out the drawer and look 
at the massive manuscript, with a com- 
passionate sense that it deserved a better 
fate. 

In common humanity it happens that 
the illusions of children, when the time 
comes for removing them, are dealt with, 
as was this first one of mine, not ungently ; 
the very hands that plucked away the veil 
are often waiting to slip on another, al- 
most as enchanting. But the grievous days 
approach when these loving ministrations 
must fail us, when the loss of illusion must 
carry with it bitterness and humiliation, 
and when, saddest of all, the comforter may 
no longer be at hand to give us the con- 
solatory luncheon at the club, to sit with 
us sympathetic at the ball game. 

When we first cease to believe in what 
we see, credulity is passing ; when we first 
cease to believe in what we imagine, faith 
is taking flight. Experience teaches us 
that the strawberries in the bottom of the 

[ i°] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

box are smaller than those on top ; but 
our benevolent imagination, loath to ac- 
cuse the berry-man of fraud, reasons the 
matter out thus : if he put only the " aver- 
age'' berries on top, we would think that 
they were his largest, and that what were 
hidden must be quite contemptible ; in try- 
ing to be candid, he would merely do him- 
self an injustice. By this charitable argu- 
ment, although we are emancipated from 
credulity, we are still linked to faith. But 
if some cynic informs us that our huckster 
spreads a few fine big berries thinly over 
the surface of a mass of wretched little 
ones, in order to sell the little ones at the 
price asked for the big — then our faith 
follows hard after our credulity ; we go to 
another berry-man, and we go to him with 
suspicion. Experiences of this character" 
tend to remove us from the ranks of the 
young in heart, and to enroll us, it may be, 
among the men of the world. 

With faith depleted, it is pretty hard 
pumping for innocence. Unless, like Tho- 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

reau, one holds aloof from society, one can 
hardly preserve innocence undeiiled. The 
simple ethics of one's early years have to 
give place to a more complicated code, in 
which self-interest and its corollary doc- 
trine, that "charity begins at home," are 
the chief gospels. *' All the morality I 
have," says one, "is never to do any- 
thing which could wound those I love, 
could they know of it, and always to do 
everything that might make them happy." 
That is a tolerably high ideal of conduct 
to maintain, yet it may not require inno- 
cence — a state of mind unspotted from 
the world. Always will innocence have 
charms, — especially for the predatory, — 
but it is not a useful virtue, and it is apt 
to promote disadvantageous associations in 
business. Most young men make haste to 
be rid of it, — and it can be eliminated 
without any serious loss of youth. 

Lest these sentiments appear in tend- 
ency subversive of accepted morality, let 
me explain that the term innocence is here 

[ ^2] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

used merely to define that condition which 
precedes in the individual the development 
of guile. The quite guileless person is the 
only innocent person, for he alone does not 
attempt to make use of others by veiled 
and indirect methods. And the innocence 
which precludes such attempts necessarily 
ceases to exist after the first hard blows at 
faith. 

Yet some persons never accustom them- 
selves comfortably to the conventional de- 
fensive methods of the world. Their un- 
skilful subtleties are readily penetrated ; 
they accept exposure as a humorous Neme- 
sis, and seem undisturbed when they fail to 
carry off their small hypocrisies. With so 
light a regard for excellence in the prac- 
tice of this art, they exhibit no acuteness 
in detecting the subtlety of other practi- 
tioners. Through all the shocks to faith 
which they endure, they never lose their 
willingness, their insatiate eagerness, to 
lend a trusting ear. They throw the door 
wide open, and mean to look over the 

[ ^3 ] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

guests at leisure. They are thus hospi- 
table, because with a generous disposition 
they unite a curiosity which does not re- 
sort to critical scrutiny, and an open-eyed 
habit of anticipation which finds in every 
one and everything some agreeable matter 
for conjecture or surprise. 

Generosity, curiosity, anticipation — on 
the persistence of these depends the per- 
sistence of youth. Vanity and emulous- 
ness, though essential in some degree to 
youth, are not exclusively its attributes ; 
they may thrive in the very oldest hearts. 
They may dwindle from the torrent to the 
trickle, even like faith, and it will not so 
much matter; but when a man ceases to 
be generous and to be curious, and when 
he is no longer lured on and on by antici- 
pation, he ceases to be young. 

He may have made the most of his 
opportunities, and yet arrive at this condi- 
tion. He may even arrive at it by delib- 
erate striving and intention, as others are 
brought to it by the natural urging of 

[ H] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

temperament. For there are two ideals 
between which one may choose, — that of 
being always young in heart, and that 
of becoming as soon as possible a man — 
or woman — of the world. 

Many men — and perhaps all women 
— of the world will resent as untrue and 
injurious the assertion that they are not 
young in heart. So much of their effort 
is given to maintaining the atmosphere 
of youth, that they may well be irritated 
by a criticism implying that, with some 
conspicuous exceptions, they have lost the 
spirit. No one so much as the man of the 
world — unless it is the woman — covets 
certain characteristics of youth, clings to 
them so tenaciously, — the vivacity, the 
appearance, the outward expression. But 
these are not fundamental qualities ; and 
the very attributes which keep youth glow- 
ing in the heart as well as shining on the 
surface, most men and women of the world 
contemn . They are not necessarily worldly 
men and women, but they are of necessity 

[ '5] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

sophisticated; and that the young in heart 
may not be. For here is the paradox of 
youth : it is the time when one is learn- 
ing, when one goes on eagerly learning ; 
but as soon as one begins to take the les- 
sons to heart, the heart is beginning to grow 
old. The young do not profit by expe- 
rience : they seek it ; they are unhappy 
unless they are in the midst of it ; and 
emerging from it, they at once go caracol- 
ing off in search of more. If it has been 
a pleasant lesson, they say blithely, " An- 
other good time salted down and put away 
where the devil can't get at it ; " if it has 
been a harsh one, they dash the tears from 
their eyes, clap spurs to their beaten hope, 
and ride away singing — and never mind 
if the voice breaks ; no one will be there 
to hear. The lure of the freedom and the 
beauty and the essential goodness of life 
ever leads them on, and the men and 
women of the world smile at them kindly 
and complacently. 

They are bunglers ; they gape open- 

[ i6] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

mouthed when it would be discreet to drop 
eyelids and pass on : they repeatedly justify 
the condescension with which those who 
have profited by experience regard them : 
yet in spite of this they are lovable, as no 
men of the world, as few women of the 
world, ever are. Their indiscretions, their 
mistaken enthusiasms, their awkwardnesses 
that hurt none but themselves, their in- 
genuous interest in life and in persons, 
win the affection — and one's whole affec- 
tion can never be engaged by those at 
whom one may not sometimes humor- 
ously smile. The young in years respond 
to the young in heart, as they do not to the 
men of the world, — with whom usually 
they sit stiff, overawed, and constrained. 
Indeed, it is a weakness that youth never 
quite outgrows, to be always somewhat 
overcome in the presence of those who 
wear the air of large and opulent experi- 
ence, or of those who are distinguished for 
noteworthy accomplishment. With all its 
superficial vanity and exuberant shouting, 

[ ^7 ] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

youth is at bottom humble-minded and 
ready to have its gaze directed upward. It 
does not minimize or depreciate; it has 
a catholic respect for achievement; it is 
aware of its own limited and imperfect 
fulfilment of its tasks: and yet, even to 
the last, it strives with gallant confidence. 
But, said Audrey, " I hope it is no dis- 
honest desire to desire to be a woman of 
the world." Surely not; in denying to those 
who are of the world certain engaging 
traits of the young in heart, one must 
allow that they have their special merits 
and virtues. Perhaps they inspire a deeper 
confidence, if not so warm a love. Equal 
to the occasion, serene, unmoved by ex- 
travagant enthusiasm, discreetly refraining 
from violent expressions of prejudice and 
hate, they contribute a balance and a cool 
temper to life, and are worthy of the ad- 
miration bestowed on them by the young. 
They are the conservatives ; the young in 
heart are the radicals. They concern them- 
selves with securing a more comfortable 

[ i8 ] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

adjustment of existing forces; the young 
in heart are absorbed in creating new ex- 
plosives. In law, diplomacy, and statecraft, 
we profit by the labors of the men of the 
world ; in literature, painting, and explora- 
tion, we are debtors to the young in heart. 
Indeed, the pursuits in which men of the 
world show at their best are those in 
which the spirit of youth must inevitably 
droop. It will resist most hardily disap- 
pointment, failure, and sorrow; but in 
the blandly successful life it does not 
thrive. Enveloped in artifice and conven- 
tion, breathing the atmosphere of tradition, 
and oppressed by the crowding demands 
of complicated petty problems, it is slowly 
stifled ; it has not scope in which it may 
buoyantly expand. Youth grows strong 
with privation, and is invalided on a sur- 
feit. The man of the world has experi- 
enced a surfeit, and, if he is a successful 
man of the world, continues to experience 
it. His anticipations are moderate, his en- 
thusiasms are restrained. But ardent, crav- 

[ 19] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

ing youth, which, whatever its achieve- 
ment, rejoices in it only for a moment and 
then, still panting from the effort, turns 
away forever and moves toward a future 
attainment that shall indeed be success — 
that is the spirit that expires in a world 
of equable and comfortable adjustment 
and of nice balancings. Browning's lines, 

" Grow old along with me, 
The best is yet to be. 
The last of life for which the first was made," 

translated into our common idiom, must 
mean, "Keep young along with me," — 
for only so may the reader share with the 
poet that always bright and eager anticipa- 
tion of unquenchable youth. 

It is true that youth is given to ex- 
cesses ; no matter what a man's years, if 
he have a young heart, it will always be 
more urgent and compelling than his 
elderly head. Always he will lean towards 
extravagance in admiration, and splendor 
in indignation. Only the young are lov- 

[ 20] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

ers ; only the young can hate. Here, taken 
from Mr. Chesterton's admirable bio- 
graphy, is an account of Browning's last 
days — cited because it seems so well to 
illustrate the survival in age of the spirit 
of youth. 

** During his last Italian period he seems 
to have fallen back on very ultimate sim- 
plicities, chiefly a mere staring at nature. 
The family with whom he lived kept a 
fox cub, and Browning would spend hours 
with it, watching its grotesque ways ; when 
it escaped, he was characteristically enough 
delighted. The old man could be seen con- 
tinually in the lanes round Asolo, peering 
into hedges and whistling for the lizards. 

*' This serene and pastoral decline, surely 
the mildest of slopes into death, was sud- 
denly diversified by a flash of something 
lying far below. Browning's eye fell upon 
a passage written by the distinguished Ed- 
ward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for 
many years, in which Fitzgerald spoke in 
an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

Barrett Browning. Browning immediately 
wrote the ' Lines to Edward Fitzgerald,' and 
set the whole literary world in an uproar. 
The lines were bitter and excessive to have 
been written against any man, especially 
bitter and excessive to have been written 
against a man who was not alive to reply. 
And yet, when all is said, it is impossible 
not to feel a certain dark and indescribable 
pleasure in this last burst of the old barbaric 
energy. The mountain had been tilled and 
forested, and laid out in gardens to the sum- 
mit ; but for one last night it had proved 
itself once more a volcano, and had lit up 
all the plains with its forgotten fire. And 
the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for 
that great central sanctity, — the story of a 
man's youth. All that the old man would 
say in reply to every view of the question 
was, * I felt as if she had died yesterday.' " 
After all, the excessive persons are the 
expressive persons ; emotion is essential to 
expression, and the habit of expression 
promotes and intensifies emotion. There- 

[ 22] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

fore is expression the better part of life ; 
it is the great generator of human sym- 
pathy. The old-hearted, outworn persons 
of the world are those who have the most 
persistent craving for fresh sensations, fresh 
impressions, and who, from laziness, selfish- 
ness, or diffidence, think it not worth while 
to communicate what is already theirs, and 
so suffer it to perish within them. 

" I loafe and invite my soul,'* 

cried Whitman ; if he had done only that, 
he would never have derived from life the 
enjoyment which made him a prophet. 
In the industry wherewith he recorded and 
interpreted those periods of loafing, rather 
than in his indolent baskings, did he ex- 
hibit his essential youthfulness. It is the 
lazy, diffident selfishness of age that shrinks 
from revivifying and interpreting experi- 
ence, so that it shall please and interest an- 
other ; it is the generosity of youth that is 
the primal impulse to expression. 

An^ with this generosity a certain gal- 

[ 23] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

lantry is required. The faculty of expres- 
sion demands the best that vitality can give. 
It calls for energy when one's mood may 
be relaxed, for sustained vigor and cheer- 
fulness and an undaunted spirit in adver- 
sity. We have looked upon Browning as 
an exemplar in his old age of the exces- 
siveness of youth ; here let a nameless and 
far humbler writer serve to illustrate for us 
the gallantry of the young in heart. To an 
editor who knew him only through his 
work he sent a story, and with the story 
this letter : *' Please pardon a personal note. 
Almost to a certainty, before I can hear 
from you about the inclosed manuscript, 
I. shall have passed beyond this life. Will 
you, therefore, in case the story is avail- 
able, make the check out to my wife ? — 
and that would be all right if I were still 
here. Thank you for your past kindnesses ; 
good-by." It was a story of brave adven- 
ture by ice and sea, written in a brave 
spirit. It was indomitable youth that faced 
clear sighted the imminent death, and 

[ H] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

while awaiting it occupied itself — urged 
on, no doubt, by unselfish thought of 
another — with fashioning tales of manly 
courage and activity. One imagines the 
man of the world facing death with equal 
fortitude, setting his house in order and pre- 
paring for the end with serenity ; one does 
not so readily imagine him engaging to the 
end in such gay and ardent accomplishment. 
It has been too foreign to him through his 
life. 

The sorrowful reflection is that the vast 
multitude of human beings are neither 
young in heart nor men — or women — of 
the world. The lives of most people are 
necessarily so circumscribed that to be men 
of the world is not their aim, because if 
hardly comes within their conception ; but 
there are few who have not at some time 
experienced youth, however prematurely 
the spirit of it may have withered. Those 
who could not be of the world, yet might 
be young, have made craven surrender of 
their youth in the struggle with exacting 

[ 25 ] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

care or in the preoccupations of responsi- 
bility. In their annual vacations, respon- 
sibility or grinding care allows them a 
brief reunion with the prisoner — whose 
face now they hardly know ; then back 
into the cell goes youth, and the key is 
turned for another year. Can youth never 
be aided to elude the jailer and escape to 
freedom? It is worth a man's while to 
plot and sacrifice for this ; for if he liber- 
ates and recovers his youth, he will enter 
upon the last stage of his journey march- 
ing as march the veterans when passing in 
review. That such daring rescues are pos- 
sible, we know ; we sometimes see men 
whose old age blossoms gayly, after years 
*of barrenness ; we see men who, after a 
lifetime of effort, have cleared about them 
a space where the sunlight may shine. 
How nowadays shall Ponce de Leon equip 
himself for his quest ? 

When it is said of a man that he has no 
outside interests, the phrase implies that he 
is self-centred, self-absorbed. He has put 

[ 26] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

away childish things, and he has put away 
youth also. In no objective sense has he 
an interest in life ; he has an interest only 
in his own life, and the attentiveness and 
intensity of this interest are painful. No 
man can be really young who has lost 
what may be called the sense of external- 
ity, who cannot at the moment of un- 
healthy tension turn his mind to playing 
with some opportune irrelevancy or direct 
his eye to some incongruous scene, — who 
cannot, in other words, allow himself a 
certain humorous indulgence. Humor is 
the shield of the young in heart, as wit 
is the weapon of the man of the world. 

This humorous indulgenceor preoccupa- 
tion with the irrelevancy that brings relief 
is often exasperating in those of immature 
years, and is then designated irresponsibil- 
ity. Later in life, when a man has become 
too subdued to his task or too immersed in 
his own personal ambitions to be an orna- 
ment of society, his occasional return to 
irresponsibility would be welcomed. And 

[ 27] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

it is by relaxing in this manner, by ** lim- 
bering up," by admitting inconsequence 
to an honorable place beside the haughty 
and firm figure of absolute conclusiveness, 
that senile decay of the heart may be ar- 
rested and youth be restored to lack-lustre 
eyes. No treason to the essential respon- 
sibilities is involved, no demoralized con- 
duct, no neglect even of the most petty 
minutiae. All that is required is a whim- 
sical attitude of mind, and the appropria- 
tion of odd moments to project upon the 
fancy the irresponsible flight that may 
never be realized. For example, there is 
a certain slave of routine, who is in the 
habit of cheering himself with imaginary 
excursions. " I think," he says, " I will 
not go to the office to-day. Instead, I 
will buy a ticket and go South. Then 
I will telegraph the chief, * Oflf for six 
months. Do as you think best.' What 
do you think he'll do?" And thus he 
whistles himself to his work and cheers his 
meticulous way. 

[ 28 ] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

It is unquestionably true that a life which 
has been devoted to narrow personal in- 
terests, and which was never much gifted 
with humor or fancy, cannot be quite re- 
juvenated. But some spark of youth has 
been rekindled if the man, though unre- 
sponsive to all that lies about him, acquires 
an interest in playing a part as well as in 
plodding forward to his little goal. A 
sculptor who was working upon a statue 
of Lincoln had a suit of clothes made, that 
should be the counterpart of those worn 
by the President. When they came from 
the tailor, freshly folded and creased, the 
sculptor sought for some one who might 
wear them and give them the proper sem- 
blance of use ; and he found this man in 
an old farmer of the neighborhood. The 
farmer undertook the task for a considera- 
tion, and daily paraded about the country- 
side in the clothes that Lincoln might 
have worn. And gradually these garments 
clothed him with a new dignity ; they 
invested him with an interest in Lincoln's 

[ 29 ] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

personality; he studied Lincoln's life and 
tried to conform his personal appearance 
more nearly to Lincoln's, — tried gradually 
to make Lincoln the standard in his speech, 
his thought, his acts; and from wear- 
ing the clothes in fulfilment of a contract, 
continued to wear them as the manifesta- 
tion of his heart's desire, fondly imagin- 
ing himself, not Lincoln indeed, yet in 
some remote way Lincoln's kindred spirit. 
There was something so innocent, so naive 
in this impersonation, something so mod- 
est, too, that it evoked kindliness rather 
than ridicule ; and as it certainly made 
the old man's life more full and interest- 
ing to himself, so also did it enlarge the 
human understanding and sympathy of his 
neighbors. 

To every man who has labored ambi- 
tiously and long, there must come a time 
when he accepts the truth of Stevenson's 
words, ** Whatever else we are intended 
to do, we are not intended to succeed; 
failure is the fate allotted." The convic- 

[30] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

tion need not affect a man's purpose or 
paralyze his efforts. But when it is re- 
luctantly admitted, then is the time for 
him to discover that whatever disappoint- 
ments await him at the end of the long 
road, at the goal towards which he had so 
steadfastly set his eyes, there are compen- 
sations lying for him on either hand. If 
he cannot discover this and is one of those 
who never had youth in their hearts, he 
will compress his lips more sternly, more 
obstinately, and in sullen rebellion con- 
tinue on his way. Him we may respect, 
but he does not have our love. On the 
other hand, if he says to himself, " Well, 
I can't get what I thought and hoped, but 
there's something ahead that perhaps I can 
have, and I mean to keep on, — why, hello ! 

— the road 's a good deal more pleasant 
than I thought it ; of course I '11 keep on ! " 

— when a man takes his disappointment 
so, and after the first dejection of weariness 
looks up from his resting place and smiles 
to see the buttercups brightening themea- 

[ 31 ] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

dows — we respect him and love him also. 
He is coming into happiness when he thus 
recovers his youth. 

The young in heart are happy — and 
what is more important, they contribute 
unawares to the happiness of others. They 
may not be so ** interesting" as the tragic 
figures of life, or even as the morbid and 
melancholy ; they do not present so many 
points of view from which to be studied, 
as they who are of the world ; but they 
diffuse, wherever they are, a warmth and 
light of happiness. Men and women of 
the world have their mission of dissemi- 
nating happiness also, and worthily per- 
form it; yet the happiness within their gift 
is of a less elemental and pervasive kind. 
That which youth scatters so freely is 
of the spirit ; that which emanates from 
the world requires for its appreciation a 
certain discriminating intelligence. The 
communication from youth is electric 
and instant, from the people of the world 
gradual and deliberate. 

[ 32] 



THE YOUNG IN HEART 

Yet at the last, one must hesitate to ex- 
clude the spirit of youth entirely from men 
and women of the world. It is surely true 
that they who are and who remain most 
thoroughly young in heart are untouched 
by sophistication, and that in those who are 
most perfectly of the world there is left 
no illusion of youth. These two extremes 
represent, the one, the most gifted, the 
other, the most highly developed of the 
human race. But there are a few — es- 
pecially among women — in whom there 
is even to the end a fine balance between 
youth and sophistication preserved, a few 
who to the freshness of enthusiasm and 
illusion unite the tact and grace that grow 
with experience and the serenity that has 
succeeded faith. These gentle and sweet 
spirits, touched by the knowledge of the 
world, are yet more infallibly convinced of 
its goodness, and bear unconsciously within 
their lives the vision of two ideals. 



II 

LAWN TENNIS 



LAWN TENNIS 

There will probably be no quarrel with 
the statement that the value of any out- 
door game is measured, not so much by the 
physical exercise it necessitates, as by the 
satisfaction and outlet it gives to the spirit 
of combat that troubles us. Those in 
search of exercise for its own sake, desirous 
of enlarging their muscles, expanding their 
chests, and improving their state of health, 
will be better rewarded by devoting them- 
selves to calisthenics and gymnastics, to 
swimming or riding, than by the enthusi- 
astic pursuit of any game. The symmet- 
rical development of the body is not the 
usual result of games, any more than it is 
their primary object ; and it need not dis- 
parage their value to make this admission 
at the outset. It is, however, an admirable 
quality which they all possess that they 
call for muscular activity in some form or 

[ 37 ] . 



LAWN TENNIS 

other, and that they cause it to be exer- 
cised with zest and enjoyment instead of 
as an irksome duty that one owes to one's 
person. And therefore, in estimating the 
value of a game, we cannot quite leave out 
of account the possibilities it affords for 
exercise ; supposing that in other respects 
there were equality, that game would be 
the best which called into play the freest 
use of the body. 

As a matter of fact, there is no equality 
among games ; they do not all have the 
same effect on the character, they do not 
satisfy quite the same emotions or suit 
equally all temperaments, as is evident 
when one considers that different games 
appeal to different men. Yet in them all, 
modulated to various degrees of youth or 
age, strength or weakness, it is the element 
of contest that supplies the interest and 
performs the greatest service to the players. 
And that game which on the whole best 
satisfies the contentious spirit may be said 
to fulfil most completely its purpose. 

•[ 38 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

I start with the proposition that this 
game is lawn tennis. I am not indifferent 
to the merits of golf, baseball, football, 
or any other outdoor game, but which of 
these demands of its evej-y participant the 
direct, constant, and active opposition of 
tennis? "Football,'' you say at once; 
well, perhaps. Shall I seem to evade the 
issue if I submit the point that football in 
its most important manifestations is now 
a spectacle rather than a game, that ex- 
cept among schoolboys it is played not so 
much for fun as for a certain glory, that 
it is for us, as the gladiatorial combats were 
for the Romans, as the bullfight is for the 
people of Spain and Mexico, an amuse- 
ment for the spectators rather than a re- 
creation for the participants ? I have often 
been struck by the satisfaction of college 
players when the season closes, and by their 
readiness after they leave college to drop 
football entirely. The game which so 
many are glad to have done with and 
which requires sacrifices that men beyond 

[ 39 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

a certain age are unwilling to make, does 
not serve most completely the purpose of 
a game. 

In baseball the nine players on each 
team are not all simultaneously and con- 
stantly in action. If it is a " pitchers' bat- 
tle/' the three outfielders have a dull time 
of it, and the team at bat have long idle 
periods. It is a good game, it is the na- 
tional game, yet one would hesitate to say 
that it meets more fully than any other 
the requirements. 

In golf you can do nothing to harass 
your antagonist, outmanoeuvre him, check 
him when he is winning, or lure him into 
pitfalls ; you can strive to improve your 
own play, you cannot hamper his. There 
is no need of quick decision, there is no 
opportunity for strategy, the element of 
direct, aggressive opposition is lacking; 
therefore golf does not best fulfil the pur- 
pose of a game. 

Hockey deserves wider and more enthu- 
siastic recognition than it has yet won; in 

[40] 



LAWN TENNIS 

its swift, unceasing action and its constant 
conflict, it comes near being an ideal game. 
But it is hardly universal enough ; on 
each side there is one player condemned 
to a post of responsible idleness, which is 
only now and then enlivened by brief flur- 
ries. While the others are racing back and 
forth on the ice, the goal-keeper stands 
alone, freezing his toes. And because of 
this melancholy adjunct, because it does 
not permit to all its players an equal de- 
gree of activity and opposition, one must 
regretfully deny to hockey the palm. Yet 
there need never be any rivalry betw^een 
tennis and hockey ; the conditions that 
make possible the one forbid the other. 

Now let us examine the case for tennis. 
That it is entitled to the place of suprem- 
acy among games seems to me no unrea- 
sonable claim. 

First of all and most important : when 
you are playing tennis, whether in singles 
or doubles, it is always you and your op- 
ponent. You are not looking on, except 

[41 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

for the briefest moment ; you are not get- 
ting any more rest than you wish, you 
are more often not having as much as 
you would like. From the first stroke of 
the game to the last, you are in constant 
yet always changing opposition to another 
player. Even in the doubles on the strokes 
that are your partner's, you are not a mere 
spectator ; you are running backward, for- 
ward, keeping pace with him, seeking the 
position in which the next ball may be 
most advantageously received. Your de- 
cision must be instant ; in the fraction 
of a second you determine whether you 
shall drive the ball or toss it into the air, 
place it on the left or on the right, rush 
to the net or run back ; you must have 
an instinctive knowledge of what your 
opponent expects you to do and then, if 
possible, do something else. Once you 
have succeeded in outwitting him, the tri- 
umph is all yours ; you divide the honors 
with no one. Tennis more than any other 
game has the qualities that gave the duel its 

[42 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

fascination ; it is all eager and alive, two 
men at close quarters, feinting, parrying, 
thrusting, both alert for an opening to 
give the final coup de grace. 

Call to mind some long rally that you 
have had ; remember how on one occa- 
sion when your opponent was playing deep 
in the court, you drew him to the net by 
a ball chopped skilfully just over it; how 
he returned the stroke, and how you next 
shot the ball down the side line, thinking 
to pass him. But he had anticipated the 
attempt and volleyed cleverly ; then, in- 
stead of trying the cross-court shot that he 
was waiting for, you tossed the ball high 
over his head, and while he spun round and 
raced for it you trotted to the net, prepared 
to "kill" the lob that he should send in 
return. And just as you had hoped, it was 
a short lob ; but instead of killing it, you 
decided it would be more fun to keep him 
running, and you turned the ball over into 
the farther corner of his court. He went 
after it at full speed and lobbed again, — 

[43] 



LAWN TENNIS 

it was all he could do, poor fellow, — and 
again the ball fell short, again you had him 
at your mercy. Nor did you smash the 
ball this time ; instead, you turned it off 
slowly into the other corner. He sprinted 
hard and reached it, only to pop it up 
easily once more. And now you gathered 
yourself; you saw out of the tail of your 
eye that he had turned and had already 
started back desperately toward the far- 
ther corner ; and you landed on that ball 
with all your might, beat it to the earth, 
and sent it bounding straight at the place he 
was leaving. He made a miserable, futile 
effort to right himself and shift his racket ; 
then you saw him walk slowly after the 
ball, with his head drooping and his shoul- 
ders heaving up about his ears, and you 
chuckled to yourself with huge approval 
of your own astute play, — "That got his 
wind, I guess.'* 

There is a human amusement in making 
your antagonist run back and forth thus 
earnestly and desperately ; but one has a 

[44] 



LAWN TENNIS 

more exalted satisfaction in placing a shot 
so sudden, swift, and accurate that the 
opposing player has not time to move. 
Teasing your man, you feel your power 
over a particular individual ; paralyzing 
him by a stroke, you experience a moment 
of omnipotence. "There," you say, ** there 
I sent a ball that nobody could touch." 
In your sublimity you may even spare a 
moment's compassion for the poor wretch 
who stands rooted in astonishment, dazed 
by the bolt before which champions had 
been powerless. You say to him conde- 
scendingly, *'I caught that just right;" 
you may even intimate, if you are mag- 
nanimous, that you do not expect to do 
the thing every time. But in your heart 
you are boastfully hopeful, you feel that at 
last you have found your game, and you 
believe that you have the man cowed. 

And how is it when instead of driving 
your opponent before you and exhibiting 
a cleverness that seems really outside your- 
self, a supernatural precision of eye and 

[45 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

arm, you are going down to defeat ? Is 
there any delight in that ? From a wide 
range of personal experience I would mod- 
estly assert that there is. Although you 
realize that the doom is drawing nearer, 
although to avert it you put forth your 
mightiest efforts and only lose in strength 
and breath while your adversary seems to 
be renewing his inhuman power, you fight 
on, hoping even to the last that you may 
turn the tide and pull out a glorious vic- 
tory. You make a stroke that spurs you 
on, you follow it with three that provoke 
your bitterest self-contempt, and you plant 
yourself with melodramatic determination 
in your soul and, doubtless, upon your 
face. " The Old Guard dies, but never 
surrenders ; " was there no joy for them 
in their supreme, superb annihilation ? It 
makes after all little difference to you emo- 
tionally whether your fight against odds is 
a winning or a losing one, so long as it is 
the best fight that you can put forward. 
To be in the thick of it, battering away 

[46 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

undaunted, is the fun. Even if your op- 
ponent so far overmatches you that the 
outcome is hardly in question, you may 
have as good a time as if you stood to 
win ; for you go in resolved to break down 
his cool assurance, to make him show his 
best efforts, to unmask and damage his 
strategy and gain his respect; and while 
you are striving with all your pigmy fury 
to achieve this, you now and then must 
pause to admire the overwhelming strokes 
of his resourceful master hand. 

It seems fitting here to consider the 
theory, often advanced and seldom dis- 
puted, that a sport is the better for an 
element of danger. If this is true, the ad- 
vocates of tennis must be dumb. Nothing 
worse than a sprained ankle or a wrenched 
knee can befall a man on a tennis court ; 
and these, however painful, are not heroic 
injuries. I once heard an eloquent and 
distinguished man in the course of a bril- 
liant address declare that the occasional 
deaths occurring in polo, in football, on the 

[47 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

hunting field, are the price the Anglo- 
Saxon race pays for its position of head- 
ship and command. It was an impressive 
and inspiring oration ; and this sentiment 
was echoed with a great outburst of ap- 
plause. Yet it does not bear cool scrutiny. 
The football player will tell you that, once 
in the game, the possibility of injury does 
not occur to him ; the polo player will 
say the same ; after you have taken the 
first jump, danger in the hunting field 
does not beset you. Where there is no 
consciousness of danger, there is no brav- 
ery. In the heat of battle no man is a 
poltroon. Yes, but to take the first jump, 
to go into the game, it is urged — does not 
that compel and develop a man's courage ? 
Only if he is physically unfit or danger- 
ously ignorant; under other circumstances 
to enter a sport in which there is an ele- 
ment of peril is as natural for the boy 
or the man, and as little an indication 
of character, as to go to bed when one is 
sleepy or to eat when one is hungry. The 

[48 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

boy who is heavy and strong, and whose 
friends are playing football, will take up 
the game; the man who rides well, and 
whose friends are playing polo, will try 
his hand at it ; and in neither case is 
there, on account of the physical risk, any 
access of courage to the novice. The foot- 
ball player is no more to the front when 
there is a runaway horse to be stopped 
or a woman to be saved from drowning 
than any other chivalrous and hardy man. 
It is not the element of danger in a game 
which trains one to fortitude and courage; 
it is the element of opposition, purely. 
He is the courageous man who in the 
crisis of the contest responds the more 
daringly and steadfastly the more he is 
tried ; and that he may be at the moment 
in some remote peril of life or limb adds 
nothing to his stature, increases not at all 
the importance of the test. The injuries 
and deaths that sometimes take place in 
our rougher sports should not be viewed 
as glorifying these forms of contest ; they 

[49 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

are deplorable calamities, with no miti- 
gation. It seems to me beyond debate 
that the game which is entirely harmless 
in its play, which does not imperil the 
man, and which has none the less qualities 
that make for manliness, is the best of all 
games. 

Certainly, of them all tennis is the most 
universal; small boys, girls, women, men 
of three generations, play it, and the crack 
has not very much more enjoyment out 
of it than the duffer. So long as a player 
feels within him possibilities of growth, 
he enjoys the game ; and even when these 
fail, even when he realizes that he is slip- 
ping backward, he clings on, light-heart- 
edly contesting every inch of the decline 
with some one of his contemporaries. " If 
I cannot keep pace with the advancing 
battalion, I shall not head those who are 
in retreat,'' cries your optimist ; and so — 
because tennis players are generally opti- 
mists — you will see on any warm sum- 
mer day veterans urging their old limbs 

[ 50] 



LAWN TENNIS 

upon the grassy courts, crouching in their 
play with racket held stiffly, trotting with 
little, timorous steps, poking at the ball 
with the gesture of uncertain vision; and 
you watch them awhile and think per- 
haps in the pride of your youth, *' There 
can't be much fun in that/' And then, 
while you are looking on, they begin to 
wrangle about some point ; they are sus- 
picious as to whether or not that ball 
actually did strike the line; and such ver- 
bal vitality as those four old men will 
then display, congregating at the net, wag- 
ging their heads, and finally examining 
the ball itself for traces of whitewash ! 
You do not doubt any longer that their 
tennis is something of extreme moment 
to them ; and you wonder if with your 
own occasional slipshod indifference to 
your rights on doubtful points you do not 
show an unworthy slight regard for a noble 
game. 

In fact, I think that a match between 
old men deeply in earnest is a spectacle 

[ 51 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

more inspiring to one's humanity than a 
tournament of champions. I do not mean 
that I would rather watch it ; I do not 
deny that for a spectator in ordinary mood 
it is a slumberous proceeding. Yet if 
one is in an idle, reflective, kindly frame of 
mind, there is nothing so cheering to one's 
faith, so soothing to one's soul, so hopeful 
and sane and healthy, as the sight of these 
graybeards, — venerable enough when you 
meet them on the street, and now scam- 
pering after a ball with the single-minded 
passion of a dog or a child. Their squab- 
bles and their laughter are alike pleasant 
to the ear ; and when they stop between 
sets to rest and draw their asthmatic breath, 
you look at them admiringly, and hope 
that when you grow old you too may be 
this kind of fine old boy. 

There is charm also, though of a dif- 
ferent nature, in observing the young duf- 
fer. I know not why it should be so, but 
the strong young duffer in tennis is a 
more ungainly and grotesque creature than 

[52] 



LAWN TENNIS 

any that is furnished forth in other sports. 
The golfer who swings without hitting the 
ball is an object of mild derision ; his 
crestfallen appearance after so tremendous 
an output of power delights our hard 
American humor. In the same way the 
spectacle of an unskilful baseball player 
awkwardly muffing a "fly" has always a 
ludicrous aspect for the "bleachers." If we 
do not sit upon the bleachers, we with- 
hold the ridiculing outcry, but our amuse- 
ment is no less keen for being suppressed. 
The gingerly clumsiness with which a 
well-grown man will hold up a tennis 
racket, seeming appalled by the harmless 
instrument, prepares us to watch for his 
next entertaining capers. He poses him- 
self with great care, gives a fine prelimi- 
nary flourish of his weapon, and then taps 
the ball with a lady-like movement and 
laborious intentness of aim. It goes wild, 
and he screws his body to one side with a 
frantic instinct to correct the disappointing 
flight. I would not seem unsympathetic 

[ 53 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

with the duffer ; how should I hope for 
mercy, showing none ! 

Given, as he usually is, to expletive and 
malediction, the beginner is never so ram- 
pant as he who has progressed a stage and is 
trying strokes. Genus irritabile ! The duffer 
is determined to master the drive — that 
long low stroke that skims the net and 
then drops sharply, the stroke that is inval- 
uable to one playing in the back of the court. 
Holding his racket conscientiously in the 
manner prescribed, he advances upon an 
easy bound, swings, leaping from the earth 
with both feet, and sends the ball flying 
over the club-house. Then what vocifera- 
tion ! He has not the contained solemnity 
of the veterans playing near by, or the ab- 
sorbed anxiety of mien of the utter duffer; 
his interest in the game itself seems not so 
profound, and therefore is not so touching 
as theirs ; he is animated too keenly by an 
egotistical desire for self-improvement. 

When the duffer has at last attained a 
** stroke," it is too often only to become 

[ 54 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

its slave. There is so much physical satis- 
faction in making a clean, swift, forehand 
drive across court or down the side line 
that a player who has a moderate profi- 
ciency in this will try it under the most 
rash and ill-favored conditions. Running 
at full speed and just reaching the ball that 
he should lob, he will swipe desperately, 
and the occasional lucky shot that he 
achieves compensates him for the half 
dozen that he has sent wild. But in the 
score his errors are not forgotten ; and at 
the end of the game he will perhaps won- 
der why so brilliant a player as himself 
does not more often win. Generally speak- 
ing, the player who cultivates a stroke lays 
himself open to attack at every other point ; 
his backhand is liable to be weak, his game 
at the net is neglected, he becomes ob- 
sessed with the notion that if he can only 
get that stroke going hard and accurately, 
it will carry him through unaided. And 
that is why many a showy player goes 
down before one whose game is more slow 

[ 55 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

and dull to watch. For any high degree 
of proficiency, speed is of course an essen- 
tial ; but extreme speed is more often ex- 
hibited by players of the second or third 
class than by the most successful cracks. 
The supreme skill lies in the ability to 
hit a ball as well from one position as 
from another, backhand, forehand, volley, 
or half-volley, and next to that in adjust- 
ing the balance between speed and accu- 
racy ; even by long practice you may never 
learn to gauge the pace above which or 
below which you may not go without 
sacrificing precision or direction. This 
requires a genius for tennis, a native in- 
stinct, and an unusual power of coordi- 
nation. 

I have never seen a match between 
players of the first rank without having 
a slightly disappointed sense that their 
performance seemed less wonderful than 
it actually was. I fancy that to any one 
who has played tennis a little, such an ex- 
hibition falls in just this way short of 

[56] 



LAWN TENNIS 

anticipation. The game is not a sequence 
of magnificent bursts of speed, sensational 
smashes, extraordinary ralhes, although at 
moments these do flash and electrify ; it 
proceeds with an outward smoothness, 
ease and rhythm of movement, that by no 
means intimates the tension of the con- 
test. The spectator is tempted to the re- 
mark, " It seems so simple ; why shouldn't 
anybody play that way ? " Every swing of 
the rackets is free, absolutely unstudied, 
propelled with the least muscular efl^ort ; 
you feel that if you were to pick up a 
racket for the first time, that would be 
exactly the way you would naturally swing 
it. And the players seem not to be run- 
ning about so very violently ; on the whole, 
not so violently as you yourself run when 
you play ; you watch them and do not 
understand how they manage this. One 
places the ball, you would say, definitely ; 
yet without much apparent exertion the 
other is there and has returned it. The 
explanation is that these players by instinct 

[57] 



LAWN TENNIS 

and long experience know how to cover 
their court and economize their strength ; 
anticipating every stroke, they are quick 
at starting ; every movement counts, and 
they go through no unnecessary flounder- 
ing ; immediate perception does for them 
what sheer strength and speed can never do 
for the less gifted. In tennis, as in other 
matters, the highest achievements often 
seem spontaneous and casual. 

Unquestionably the most distinguished 
exponents of the game that is both leisurely 
yet cat-like in quickness are the English 
gentlemen who took from us the Interna- 
tional Cup. In contrast to their method 
of covering the court, even our best 
American players seemed to rush and 
scramble. The Englishmen moved with 
an unassuming stealth, and were not over- 
anxious to receive the ball at the most 
favorable point of the bound. Our players 
obviously took greater pains to get into po- 
sition. The Englishgame was on the whole 
the more finished and perfect ; the Ameri- 

[ 58 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

can game — in singles only — the more ag- 
gressive and compulsive. The Englishmen, 
playing at top notch and with all despera- 
tion, gave the impression of still having 
something in reserve; it was always clear 
when the Americans were straining every 
resource. In the American game there 
was more personality ; in the English 
game there was more form. The quali- 
ties came out curiously in many ways — 
even in the matter of dress. In this respect 
the visitors were as precise as in their play, 
appearing always in the freshest white 
clothes, white even to their shoes, wearing 
their long sleeves flapping modestly about 
their wrists ; the Americans, with their 
various drab flannels, their black spiked 
shoes, and their rolled-up sleeves, pre- 
sented a more dangerous and less attractive 
appearance. The dilettante aspect of the 
English champions made their efficient 
performance the more astonishing to our 
eyes. They moved softly upon the grass 
with their rubber-soled shoes, instead of 

[ 59 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

tearing it with spikes according to our 
barbarous practice ; they preserved unruf- 
fled through five hard sets the garden party 
look with which they first appeared ; they 
almost made us feel that to perspire when 
playing tennis, if not actually vulgar, is at 
least undisciplined. With such refinement 
of appearance, the most scrupulous courtesy 
and sportsmanship were to be expected ; and 
indeed one of the visitors performed the 
prettiest act of the tournament. When on a 
mistaken decision the umpire awarded him 
a point that was not his, he drove the next 
ball out of court, making amends to his 
opponent. 

The gracefulness of the act was unu- 
sual, but the spirit that prompted it pre- 
vails widely in tennis, and it is this that 
gives the game so pleasant an atmosphere. 
Except occasionally for a hurried, excited 
*' How's that?" when the player is un- 
certain whether a ball is in or out, there 
is never a word said to the umpire ; and 
the times when one may see disgust, re- 

[ 60] 



LAWN TENNIS 

sentment, even a passing surprise expressed 
on a player's face at a flagrantly mistaken 
decision, are so rare as to be memorable. 
I recall at least two matches of an ago- 
nizing closeness that turned on faulty de- 
cisions, yet on neither occasion did the 
sufferer betray by glance at umpire or 
spectators any sense of injury. In no other 
game, I think, are self-control and a read- 
iness to put the best face on misfortune 
so generally the rule. 

And this is of course a part of not 
taking one's game too seriously. It is no 
uncommon thing, according to reports, 
for the defeated contestants in a decisive 
rowing race or football match to burst into 
tears. I have never heard of a deposed 
tennis champion making such a demon- 
stration. What is the difference ? Is it that 
the tension is really so much greater in 
one form of sport than in another ? Partly 
this, perhaps; but I am inclined to think 
the deeper cause lies in the fact that in 
tennis you go down to defeat alone or 

[6. ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

at most with only one other ; while in 
football and rowing your grief is redupli- 
cated for all the comrades with whom you 
have met disaster, — who undertook with 
you some responsibility that at the time 
looms disproportionately great. Now it is 
a fine thing to experience sorrow in this 
way, even though to us on the outside the 
cause appears trifling ; such suffering pro- 
motes one's sympathy and opens one's 
heart ; and when we consider the human- 
izing influence of a defeat at rowing or 
football, we do not weigh too heavily the 
foolishness of the occasional hysterical 
outburst. And tennis has no such moments 
of dramatic awakening. Its after effects 
are comparatively mild. Even in the case 
of doubles, where you have another to be 
sorry for, defeat brings out a mutual spirit 
of good humor and acquiescence ; you 
reproach yourself and your partner re- 
proaches himself, but neither of you sits 
in gloom ; there is a light touch in your 
mutual apology. And the game that is 

[62 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

permeated with so tolerant and gay a spirit 
seems to me better than the one that 
probes the deeps in men's souls. We must 
not suffer too much in our sports ; shall 
we have no joy in life? 

I am trespassing on my purpose in en- 
tering again for even a moment the field 
of controversy ; but before emerging, and 
because it bears some relation to this sub- 
ject of not taking one's game too seriously, 
I would point out that as yet there have 
been in tennis — in this country, at least 
— no squabbles about " eligibility " and 
''amateur standing," no noisy coaching 
from the side lines, and no professional 
teachers. A game which thrives, yet which 
offers no inducement to the " professional," 
is one that is played in a sufficiently light- 
hearted spirit. 

This does not qualify the importance 
of the actual contest. Those who cannot 
throw themselves into it as if for the time 
being it were the most momentous thing 
in life, will never appreciate its delighta 

[63 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

The overmastering, avaricious desire to 
win is always to be deprecated, but to be 
keen to play one's best and bear one's self 
steadily and valorously in the crisis should 
be the essential spirit of the game. To be 
sure, that is the spirit in which all games 
should be played ; but tennis least of all 
permits any shirking of the issue. When 
the crisis comes, there is no chance for 
the weak-hearted to thank his stars that 
some one else than himself is called upon; 
and if he has the spark of manhood, he will 
not look too complacently upon defeat. 
Excitement and exhaustion may wear the 
player down, but he must set himself 
only the more resolutely to the task of 
playing better than he has ever yet done. 
The time comes when his heart pounds 
and his lungs are pumping for air ; when 
he walks drooping and reeking under the 
blazing sun ; but he must not allow his 
misery to engage his mind, he must not 
debate the question how much longer he 
can endure : he must bend all his intent- 

[ 64] 



LAWN TENNIS 

ness of purpose, all the remnant of his 
strength, upon repelling the final assault 
of the foe. Of such importance is the ac- 
tual contest, — and its importance ceases 
utterly when the last point has been played. 
I am drawing for illustration upon an 
extreme case; in our ordinary matches we 
stop short of the point where suffering 
begins. We are leisurely, and we do not 
prolong our game until we are threatened 
with collapse on the court. But however 
leisurely our methods, however mild our 
strokes, tennis makes an exacting demand 
upon our faculties; the temper of the game 
is ardent, not phlegmatic. One of the best 
players this country has ever produced will 
come into the club-house between sets of 
an insignificant match, panting more with 
nervousness than with fatigue, trembling 
so that he cannot hold his racket steady, 
looking harassed, frightened, and desper- 
ate. He calls on his friends to fan him 
with towels, he tells them how scared 
he is, he holds the glass of water brought 

[ 65 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

him, in a shaking hand. Yet after the in- 
terval he will return to the court, make 
unerring shots along the lines, and show 
the most thorough command of nerves 
and muscles, even though between plays 
he is twitching with excitement. And 
after he has won, as is his usual custom, 
the game is of hardly enough interest to 
him to serve as the briefest topic of con- 
versation ; he jumps under the shower, 
and then while he dresses he discusses with 
you where he had better dine and how 
he shall pass the evening ; he may even 
insist on reading to you from some precious 
little book of poems that he keeps in his 
locker ; although it is more likely that he 
will be throwing towels and accusing some 
one of having stolen his shoes. 

The manners of tournament players in 
the presence of spectators are an interest- 
ing if trivial study. Some of them make 
it a point never to glance at the audience ; 
in idle moments they keep their eyes on 
the ground or perhaps toss them skyward 

[ 66 ] 



. LAWN TENNIS 

as they walk to their places. Others favor 
the crowd with an occasional stolid, in- 
expressive stare. A few have adopted an 
ingenuous, cheerful, confiding smile which 
they flash at certain junctures — as when 
they make a particularly bad shot. When 
they do something brilliant and there is 
applause, they look stern, even annoyed. 
Mannerisms wear ofl^ in some degree as 
the player becomes involved in the excite- 
ment of the game; but the grand-stand 
player never quite forgets himself. There 
will be the mute appeal to the heavens 
when his shot goes extravagantly wild, or 
the staggering display of exhaustion when 
he has crowned a long rally with a bril- 
liant stroke. 

But these are superficial trifles on which 
to dwell, and we shall err if we regard 
them too narrowly. Your grand-stand 
player is often as worthy a person as the 
man whom you would more readily de- 
fine as of ** sterling'' character; pass by 
the weakness of a little vanity, and he is 

[67 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

perhaps as alert to opportunities, as keen 
in the game, as plucky a fighter as his 
more steady-going opponent. Indeed, we 
are in danger of trusting our games too im- 
plicitly as tests of character. With all our 
enthusiasm for our own particular sports, 
we shall do well to pause and consider 
whether on the whole the men of high 
attainments in these go farther than other 
men. The great football hero of fifteen 
years ago is still remembered ; but since 
running the length of the field for a touch- 
down, has he done anything that is worthy 
of note ? We Americans are inclined to 
set too high a value on athletic prowess 
of any kind ; our newspapers thrust fame 
on heads too young to wear it, and there 
is sometimes a melancholy petty tragedy 
in the case of the man who is more widely 
celebrated at the age of twenty-one than 
he will ever be again. Very likely he is 
a person of good average abilities and per- 
severing character, who will fill a worthy 
quiet corner and look back with pleasure 

[ 68 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

onhis shining and triumphantyouth ; then 
there is no great harm done. But now 
and then one sees a man who played a game 
too conspicuously well and, doing so, ful- 
filled his destiny. 

Tournaments and match play are by no 
means the only feature of tennis that should 
be considered; indeed they are perhaps 
the least important. There are a hundred 
people getting enjoyment out of the game 
for every one who enters a tournament. It 
does not trouble the boy that his court is 
not good or that his racket is ill-balanced 
and poorly strung ; he marks out the lines 
with his own hands, pulls his own roller, 
and then plays the game, blithely indiffer- 
ent to all imperfections. Many a suburb- 
anite now has his cramped, sometimes 
his undersized court, where he engages 
in conflict with the neighbor on a Satur- 
day afternoon; cities are finding it neces- 
sary to provide facilities for tennis in the 
public playgrounds ; and young people 
gather there, bringing half-worn balls 

[69 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

and old rackets, and await patiently their 
turn. 

There is, however, no advantage to be 
gained from playing under difficulties ; the 
better the court, the better the fun. As 
your game improves, it ceases to be a 
laughable phenomenon if the ball repeat- 
edly strikes some irregularity of surface 
and bounds off at right angles to its proper 
course. After a time you appreciate with 
exasperation what it means to have only 
three feet of space behind the base-line ; 
you are sure that with a fair chance you 
could return those deep-driven balls, and 
you long for an opportunity to try. So 
you abandon your private court to the 
children and join a club. It is a wise 
move ; not only are the courts maintained 
in better condition, but you also have the 
advantage of testing your game against a 
variety of opponents, instead of in repeated 
meetings with the same one or two. Your 
play improves rapidly — up to the point 
where improvement ceases. 

[7°] . 



LAWN TENNIS 

It is no more than reasonable that lawn 
tennis should be at its best on grass. In 
this country, however, it is usually played 
on a surface of dirt or cinders; and cer- 
tainly for the enthusiast, who is impatient 
for the end of winter, and does not put 
away his racket until after the snow flies 
in the late autumn, the dirt court is a ne- 
cessity. It prolongs the tennis season by 
more than two months. When rain and 
mist and dew dampen the turf and make 
lawn tennis impossible, the dirt court is 
still hard and dry. It is very wearing on 
shoes and balls and rackets, it soils the 
clothes, it blisters the feet, it sends jar- 
ring vibrations through the system ; but 
it enables us to play in April and October. 
We slip and slide if we try to turn sharply, 
we find the aggressive game at the net 
hardly practicable ; yet with all its infirm- 
ities the dirt court is a most excellent 
makeshift. A good dirt court is preferable 
to a mediocre grass court ; a poor dirt 
court is better than none at all. He who 

[71] 



LAWN TENNIS 

has played on championship grounds and 
therefore decUnes a contest on his friend's 
home-made court is a tennis snob ; hap- 
pily, the type is rare. 

The good grass court is a luxury and a 
delight. To throw off one's clothes on 
a hot summer day, put on the coolest and 
lightest of garments, and run out across the 
sunny lawn, where the afternoon shadows 
lay their quiet fingers; to prance there 
and rush about and breast the net, from 
which your adversary tries hotly to dis- 
lodge you ; to hit out with the exhilarat- 
ing sweep of arm and body, to feel the 
racket responsive in your hand, to see the 
ball fly swiftly where you would have it 
go ; and through all the stress and sweat 
to be conscious of the kind sun and the 
quick turf and the green maples and elms 
that fringe the field — is not this one of 
life's priceless pleasures ? He is happy who 
learns to know it in his youth ; he is happy 
who finds that it does not fail him in his 
age. It is true that when we play tennis 

[ 72 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

we may not observe closely the trees or 
listen for the songs of birds or have leisure 
to admire the shapes and hues of floating 
clouds ; no, tennis does not bring us into 
any definite relation with nature, but that 
is the inevitable defect of an engrossing 
game. Nor is it the most social of our 
sports. Golf is a conversational oppor- 
tunity ; in baseball, to coach from the 
side lines must satisfy the most talkative. 
But tennis is all strife, with no time for 
comment. In doubles you now and then 
exchange with your partner a word of 
advice, approval, or encouragement; in 
singles you ejaculate to your opponent 
**Good shot!" or ''Hard luck!" Beyond 
this, intercourse does not go. It is, even 
in critical matches, a noiseless battle; the 
droning iteration of the score from the 
referee sitting on his high seat by the net, 
the soft thud of the ball upon the racket, 
the swift catlike steps of the players, con- 
vey no adequate intimation of the strug- 
gle. It is far different in atmosphere from 

[ 73 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

a rowing race, with the coxswains of the 
crews yelHng madly through their mega- 
phones ; from a baseball game, with its 
shrill chatter ; from a football game, with 
the quarterback shouting raucous signals 
in the arena and the inclosing myriads 
roaring out their cheers. Although it is 
so nervous and active, it is of all games 
the most silent and self-contained. 

It is not, however, utterly unsocial. 
There is talk enough afterwards in the 
club-house ; and even on the court players 
become in an acute and sympathetic though 
unspeaking way aware of one another. In 
the end tennis brings its followers into a 
more intimate relation with human na- 
ture. It purges them of their cares and 
their unhealthy thoughts and desires ; it 
clarifies the mind and makes sane the soul ; 
it satisfies the restlessness and contentious- 
ness of the spirit and gives it peace. On 
the tennis court there are developed stead- 
fastness of aim and purpose, a better tem- 
per, and a kinder heart ; here, through 

[ 74] 



LAWN TENNIS 

striving with your fellow man, you may 
learn to love him. Foes in sport are friends 
in spirit; if the hand of every man seems 
against us, and our hand against every man, 
let us spill our antagonism harmlessly upon 
the tennis court. Many a blue devil has 
here been crushed under heel, many an 
animosity has been softened. You cannot 
think altogether ill of any man against 
whom you have stood in a hard and fairly 
fought game ; you may even come to think 
well of one whom you have hitherto held 
in slight regard. Likewise, in their hum- 
ble way, do our international matches have 
a civilizing influence. The surest guaran- 
tee of a permanent peace among nations 
would be to have them striving keenly 
with one another in their games. 

Some verses read at a tennis club dinner 
represent an effort to express, not too seri- 
ously, the best that the game does for its 
players : — 

One time the most of us, no doubt. 
Had open hearts for others ; 

[ 75 ] 



LAWN TENNIS 

We scorned the shield Distrust held out. 
We met all men as brothers. 

With years cool wisdom on us slips 

The armor once declined ; 
The laugh grows idle on our lips. 

Or purpose lurks behind. 

Fearful to lose our little place, 

We dare not venture far 
To welcome others of our race. 

Men of the self-same star. 

Eager to win beyond our ranks. 

We trample others down, 
And pressing o*er them murmur thanks. 

Our eyes upon the crown. 

And yet we bear no enmity ; 
" It 's life," we sadly say; 
"We would be genial, open, free 
To all men as the day. 

"This armor that doth make us safe. 
This visor to the eye, 
We feel their weight, we feel them chafe, 
We fain would put them by." 

[ 76] 



LAWN TENNIS 

And when we come to our green field, 
Far from the strife of town, 

Forthwith in gentleness we yield 
And lay that armor down. 

The touch of flannels to our skin, 

Of grass beneath our feet, 
Of sun at throat may help us win 

Safe past the judgment seat. 



II 



Ill 

WORK AND PLAY 



WORK AND PLAY 

That more people know how to work 
than how to play seems to be a defect of 
education. All the punishments of child- 
hood are for lawlessly following the im- 
pulse to play; and nearly all the rewards 
are for aptitude and industry in work. In 
some respects there has been a relaxation ; 
the interest taken by most pedagogues in 
the sports of their pupils and the semi- 
official recognition of athletic prowess in 
schools are signs of a partial reaction. But 
it is only partial; the spirit of play is of- 
ten suppressed before it becomes articu- 
late ; the spirit of work is from the first 
fostered and stimulated. To nearly all is 
it emphasized that on work their very 
being depends ; but to only a few is it 
made clear that on play depends their well- 
being. 

As a nation, we are, it is true, devoted 

[ 8' ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

to sports and games, and therefore it would 
appear on the surface quite needless to 
point out the advantages of play. There 
is too much play already, in the opinion 
of many not illiberal persons ; they say that 
our young men at college play more than 
they work, and they instance the general 
and often unhealthy interest in racing and 
bridge. Certainly it is but natural that 
the instinct for diversion, so often cowed 
and stunted by drastic measures in child- 
hood, or perhaps given an equally unwise 
license, should be a groping or an un- 
balanced instinct, prolific of injudicious 
excesses. The unfortunate persons who 
commit these bring discredit on the art 
of play. For it is an art, of which games, 
even at their best, are only a crude and 
imperfect expression. They have their 
value; but play that requires fbr itself — 
as games do require — a special machin- 
ery and knowledge is not of the kind most 
readily available, is not the most cunning, 
and in that way most satisfying resource. 

[ 82 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

The man who is dependent on his racket 
or his bat or his pack of cards for his 
amusement, is doomed to pass many dull 
hours. Too few of us have learned how 
to play when we are alone ; too few of us 
have learned how to play with people who 
cannot use a racket or a bat or a pack of 
cards. The woman tending the plants in 
her garden is playing more profitably, it 
may be, than the admired pitcher on the 
local ball nine, who strikes out three men 
in an inning. She does not experience his 
sensational moments, but she is gayly occu- 
pied in a creative process, and that is play 
of the most soul-expanding kind. More- 
over, it is play that is not dependent on 
youth and activity, but that may continue 
to serve one in feebleness and age. 

The idea is current that action is the 
essence of play. Hence the extreme mis- 
ery of the tennis enthusiast who with 
racket and court is ready to amuse himself, 
but has no worthy foeman ; of the auto- 
mobilist whose machine is laid by for re- 

[ 83 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

pairs ; of the house party of athletes on a 
rainy afternoon. The general failure to 
perceive that there may be a very satisfac- 
tory return in the exercise of observation, 
in the practice of imagination, or even in 
the loosening of one's reluctant speech, is 
excusable, for it is just the tendency to do 
these things that was so impressively pun- 
ished when we were small. What is it that 
leads children to truancy from school, and 
to the other most heinous childish breaches ? 
In nine cases out of ten it is not any im- 
perative call to action, but merely a desire 
to See. A paltry and commonplace hill be- 
comes a height beckoning with romance ; 
and the child is not contented until he has 
scaled it and ascertained what the world 
is beyond. Nearly always this desire to see 
unites with it a belief in strange happen- 
ings and adventures, if one could only slip 
outside of the prescribed and familiar 
round ; or again, perhaps there is the con- 
viction that in violating the law, even 
though it is only to sneak away and hide 

[ 84 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

in a dark cellar, there is glorious heroism 
or martyrdom. To See and to Imagine 

— these natural faculties of man may be 
converted into a means of play, even 
as the child is trying always to convert 
them. If early experience and tradition 
had not taught us to associate a penalty 
with the employment of these faculties, 
we should not be so often at a loss for 
resources. 

Mere idleness opens up for any one who 
has eyes to see and a mind to dream a 
playground of infinite variety. To sit, for 
instance, in a garden and watch a bumble- 
bee despoiling the flowers, blundering 
tentatively from this to that, at last grap- 
pling one with fierce ardor, bending it on 
its stem and showering down the gathered 
dew, climbing up and into the very heart 
of it, and then after a brief moment 
emerging and spurning from him the pet- 
als that he had embraced so amorously, 

— this, to him who observes it with a mind 
attentive to nothing else, is play. It may 

[ 85 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

be play to stroll along a city pavement, to 
cling to a strap in a crowded car, to talk 
to one's neighbor on a stool at a lunch 
counter. And to watch a man laying 
bricks, or to lounge upon a fence and 
observe the plowman driving his horses 
in the field, or to inspect any sort of man- 
ual labor, should always entertain one who 
is at leisure, and in whose personal expe- 
rience such labor has never been more than 
a diversion. If a child's eye rests upon a 
carpenter at work, it is held in fascina- 
tion. It is unreasonable and wrong that we 
should outgrow this interest of the child ; 
the objects or occupations may become 
more familiar to us, but they should not 
seem stale ; our interest in them, instead 
of declining, should only become the more 
expert. We should be detecting charac- 
teristics and comparing methods and gain- 
ing knowledge of a variety of men. 

The disposition toward this sort of play 
is put down in early childhood with the 
frequent reminder, "You must learn not 

[ 86] 



WORK AND PLAY 

to stare at people," or, '* It isn't polite to 
point." It is repressed even more at the 
later period of school, when the boy is left 
no choice between close attention to books 
in the schoolroom and devotion to bodily 
exercise out of doors. The fact that the 
education of girls is generally so much 
more lax in both these respects accounts, 
no doubt, for the feminine '* handiness " 
and flexibility at play ; ten women for one 
man know how to amuse themselves with 
trifles, to find sport in an idea, delight in a 
conversation, and contentment in solitude. 
It is probably true that to attain their ex- 
cellent frivolity they passed through a less 
wholesome and healthy period than the 
corresponding period in the life of the 
normal boy ; so far as a man can judge, 
the typical school-girl is a capricious, vain, 
egotistical, and snobbish creature. Few 
things are more unsavory or depressing 
than the literature — fortunately not ex- 
tensive — of girls' school life ; nine tenths 
of the stories which undertake to describe 

[ 87 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

it deal with the inhuman treatment of 
schoolmates who are poorly dressed or " of 
inferior social position." A precocious fac- 
ulty of observation seems usually to be of 
the detective sort, — quick to fasten upon 
unattractive and suspicious details. It grows 
charitable and broad with years, the biting 
comments of youth are gradually tempered, 
and sarcasm, which it had been a joy to 
wield, is reserved as a weapon to be but 
rarely used. The woman is equipped for 
the gentle, genial play of life by the sharp- 
ness of wits and eyes that she learned as a 
girl. 

But the boy on emerging from school, 
where he has been so single-minded in his 
pursuits, soon finds that he is deficient in 
the faculty of observation. The acknow- 
ledgment is tacitly made to him by the 
advisory elder world that in this one vital 
respect it was necessary to bring him up 
wrong ; and he is recommended now to 
remedy by his own efforts the deficiency 
that education imposed upon him. There 

[88] 



WORK AND PLAY 

are not many harder tasks. He has been 
so bred to think of the main chance, to 
concentrate his thoughts upon his per- 
sonal work and business, to be energetic, 
brisk, and active along one line, that he 
is unable to waste time to advantage ; and 
when he is idle, it is with an unhappy and 
unprofitable restlessness. He cannot grasp 
the point of view, the whimsical, detached, 
casual, and inconsequent point of view that 
makes out of mere observation an amuse- 
ment and a play. 

Thus, in the matter of training the out- 
ward eye, education in a puzzled, half- 
apologetic way submits a tardy acknow- 
ledgment of failure. But of its failure to 
provide exercise for the inward eye be- 
fore which passes the panorama of the 
unreal, the fanciful, it makes a boast. It 
deplores as much in man as in boy the ten- 
dency to dream ; unsympathetic with the 
inward eye, it declares the day-dreamer to 
have a mind untrained, if not indeed dis- 
eased. Coeval with the admonition not 

[ 89 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

to stare and not to point the finger is the 
precept not to let the thoughts go wool- 
gathering. How smartly comes down the 
pedagogue's rule for inattention in the 
class ! How despairing is the mother's 
look when Johnny gapes with open mouth 
and meat on fork, stricken all forgetful 
of his food ! There is, I am sure, in the 
scientific spirit now prevailing among par- 
ents and nurses less encouragement than 
there used to be to the pleasant delusions of 
infancy. Have you not been a child and in- 
sisted on hollowing out your mashed potato 
and making a lake of gravy in the crater ? 
And was not the potato spoiled if the lake 
prematurely burst its banks ? Also, when 
you had your oatmeal, could you bear it 
if it was not a perfect island, — dry on top 
and entirely surrounded by cream? My 
most intense antipathy was conceived at 
the age of seven for a kind lady whom I 
visited, and who arranged my oatmeal for 
me, diligently drenching its surface. Now- 
adays, I observe, children seem unfamiliar 

[90] 



WORK AND PLAY 

with the simple diversions that I remem- 
ber so pleasantly. It is partly, perhaps, 
that they are exposed to new-fashioned 
breakfast cereals which soak up cream 
before imagination can draw breath ; it is 
partly that they are so repeatedly warned 
by their nurses and mammas not to play 
with their food. 

The atmosphere of discouragement that 
surrounds the play of children is not abated 
with the years. The enjoyment of dreams, 
the building of castles in the air, the es- 
caping from the facts of life, especially 
from the unpleasant facts, to beguile one's 
self upon fancy and dalliance are disap- 
proved and despised ; and I raise up* my 
voice in protest. What a real and blame- 
less pleasure, I exclaim, it is for the most 
of us to imagine ourselves greater, braver, 
finer than we are or than we shall ever 
be ! Entering a shop to buy a neck- 
tie, one may perhaps be interrupting the 
meditation of the salesman on how he 
should act if he were President, — how 

[91 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

gracious he would be, and benign and 
lovable, and withal how inflexibly inde- 
pendent and in crises stern. This use of 
his imagination doubtless gives him great 
pleasure, and it need not at all incapaci- 
tate him for selling neckties. The factory 
girl, watching her threads, dreams of be- 
ing the mill-owner's daughter,' driving in 
her carriage, and living in the big house 
on the hill. And she guides her threads 
as unerringly, as steadfastly, as if she felt 
the eyes of the foreman upon her. Per- 
haps it would be nearer the usual truth to 
think of her standing thus and dreaming, 
not of a bright future in which she is the 
centre, but of one that holds rest and ease 
and pleasure for her tired mother and gay- 
ety and promise for little brothers and sis- 
ters. And is one to be chidden for dream- 
ing such dreams ? 

The habit is pernicious, I grant, if it 
seizes and delays one upon the brink of ac- 
tion. Yet truly it appears to me that those 
who are excessively fond of imagining 

[ 92 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

great and improbable prospects for them- 
selves would achieve just as little were their 
love of these visions forever set at rest. 
There are some men by birth and tempera- 
ment fit only for dreams ; some by like cir- 
cumstance fit only for action; and many 
more normally composed, in whom the ca- 
pacity for each exercise might, if it were 
permitted, serve to offset and refresh the 
other. But it is thought feeble or unmanly 
to avail one's self of any such means of re- 
habilitation; we Americans, after our day's 
work is done, take our rest in further ac- 
tion, our relaxation in excitement. Yet 
were the many thousands for whom the 
theatre furnishes the most frequent even- 
ing's amusement to stroll or sit out under 
the stars, entertaining such thoughts and 
dreams as come, they would put their souls 
and minds into better order for the slumber 
of the night and for the work of the next 
day. 

Perhaps the utterance seems inconsist- 
ent in one who contends that we do not 

[ 93 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

play enough. Indeed, the popularity of the 
theatre at the present time would no doubt 
be the first fact advanced to refute the crit- 
icism. The point is made that everybody 
goes to the theatre nowadays ; the people 
who in a past generation would have been 
shocked by the suggestion sit now in the 
front row. Even the clergy have acquired 
a habit of recommending plays to their 
congregations. To be sure, these are gen- 
erally the poorest possible plays ; never- 
theless, it is an indication of the yielding 
on every side to the universal imperative 
demand for amusement. 

Thousands of flexible dancing girls with 
shrill voices, thousands of effeminate, ca- 
pering young men, pass in review each 
season before a city's audience, and go 
twirling and grimacing on. The perform- 
ances of these constitute perhaps the main 
interest for the great multitude of theatre- 
goers. Feeble wit, clumsy and shabby 
humor, meretricious music, are impu- 
dently combined ; and the audience, con- 

[94] 



WORK AND PLAY 

vinced by the tinsel of the stage, titters 
and listens and applauds. 

The audience is amused ; we must face 
that fact. And nothing could more elo- 
quently demonstrate the helplessness of the 
ordinary American when withdrawn from 
his games or his sports and confronted 
with the problem of amusing himself. His 
eyes can be diverted only by the abnormal, 
the bizarre ; the natural processes of life 
are dull and tedious to his failing imagi- 
nation. Hence the theatre is the resort, 
the amusement, of the wholly unimagina- 
tive, of those who need to have the pic- 
ture spread before them in all its details, so 
that they may comprehend it with merely 
the automatic effort of the senses. Unim- 
aginative, they have no pleasure in read- 
ing, unless it is a flat-footed kind of fic- 
tion, over which they may drowse with no 
danger of losing the thread. They cannot 
call up clear visions in their own minds, 
nor can they grasp them from the pictur- 
esque and vivid page. A mental sluggish- 

[ 95 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

ness besets them. Removed from the ex- 
citement of games and sports, they are 
more often stultified than stimulated by 
play. 

There is this to be said of Americans, 
however: because they have been well 
trained in methods of work, they get per- 
haps as much enjoyment as any people 
out of the periods of play that work itself 
affords. In purely mechanical labor there 
are no such periods, and that is why all 
those engaged in it should be permitted 
and encouraged to occupy their minds 
with dreams, and their eyes with what is 
characteristic and interesting in the ordi- 
nary movement of life. But in any work de- 
manding mental initiative or action there 
are sure to be times of pure delight. This 
comes partly from the consciousness of 
success in solving the problem on which 
one has been engaged ; the attitude of 
genial congratulation and special affection 
which one assumes then toward one's self 
holds a histrionic quality akin to play. Yet 

[96] 



WORK AND PLAY 

this is unimportant compared with the 
hopefulness and zest of the actual perform- 
ance, when for very interest one cannot 
have success or failure too closely in view. 
The plotting of a large financial scheme 
and the putting of it into execution; the 
writing at a man's best power of a dramatic 
climax; the grasping of the feature that 
will give a picture its subtle, notable dis- 
tinction, and the painting it in with a few 
creative strokes ; the first clear view to the 
end in an architectural problem, and the 
instant leaping to achieve out of common- 
place and mere convenience beauty, — these 
and the like experiences are for thinking 
and active men the most incomparable 
play. Detained from finishing or from be- 
ginning the work that beckons joyously, 
one chafes with the impatience of the boy 
in the schoolroom on the day of his cham- 
pionship game ; released, one plunges into 
the toil with the thrill and elation of the 
boy rushing to the strife. 

The pathetic and yet the eternally cheer- 

[ 97 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

ful and assuring paradox is this, — that 
delight in performance by no means guar- 
antees excellence of work. One may hum- 
bly imagine how Shakespeare exulted in 
Mark Antony's funeral address, striking it 
off perhaps in a couple of glorious im- 
mortal hours, now dipping his quill with 
a leisurely smile at his own cunning, now 
writing with a concentrated passion. Yet 
it is our privilege to know that Alberta 
Smitherson — spoken of as the coming 
authoress — made similar demonstrations, 
and felt something of the same emotion, 
when she composed the story that has just 
been rejected by the ** Boudoir Magazine.'' 
It is certainly a bountiful provision of 
nature that in the capacity of men for en- 
joyment and delight there is no such wide 
disparity as in their power for creation and 
achievement. 

Unquestionably, the nobler the work, 
the more refreshing must be its aspects to 
him whom it engrosses. It strengthens a 
man to feel that, whether he wins or loses, 

[98] 



WORK AND PLAY 

his labor is not undertaken simply for his 
own profit, and that the question is a far 
greater one than merely that of success 
or failure. The old English astronomer, 
Halley, was one of the sublime among the 
world's workers ; yet exceptional as is his 
story, it is only typical of the true men 
of science of every age. He was born in 
1656; the last transit of Venus had taken 
place in 1639, the next would not occur 
until 1 76 1. Yet it was this phenomenon 
that engaged his attention; he sought to 
ascertain what astronomers- might learn 
from the celestial happening that he had 
never seen and could never see. As the 
result of his study, he left accurate calcu- 
lations and directions which should enable 
the skilled observer of a transit of Venus 
to deduce from that brief event the dis- 
tance of the earth from the sun, the mag- 
nitudes of the planetary orbits, indeed, the 
scale of the whole solar system, — of all 
which matters the world was then in ig- 
norance. And when the transit occurred, 

[ 99 ] 

Lora 



WORK AND PLAY 

astronomers who had stationed themselves 
for it in Otaheite and in Europe followed 
the instructions that Halleyhad bequeathed 
them, and hence were able to make a con- 
tribution to human knowledge impressive 
enough to rank with the discoveries of 
Newton and Kepler and Galileo. The 
man whose fertile mind had prepared the 
way, and who knew that he would be 
silent in his grave years before his theory 
could be put to the test, had busied him- 
self gayly and happily in the unfinishable 
task ; no doubt, when he perceived whither 
his investigations were leading him, he 
could not have been more excited, more 
eager, had there been a transit of Venus 
scheduled for the next morning. And let 
us make mention, too, of those worthy 
followers who spent years preparing for the 
rare happening of a few hours, taking 
practice observations of a fictitious sun and 
a fictitious Venus, living and working, it 
might seem, to see the transit once, and 
again eight years later, with the overshad- 

[ ic)o ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

owing dread that cloudy weather might 
set all at naught and the phenomenon be 
unseen of mortal eyes for more than an- 
other century. 

Life is both a usurer and a spendthrift. 
The weak, the maimed, the toilers under 
crushing burdens of poverty, disease, and 
despair, who are held to the most exacting 
interest on the loan of their few troubled 
earthly years, often meet the obligation 
with a more abiding conscience and honor 
than those dowered at their birth and 
attended always by a lavish fortune. We 
may not seek for the equity in an arrange- 
ment which imposes upon one man work 
that is all drudgery, and on another, who 
has the implements of play at command, 
work that is, much of it, play. There is 
no cant so unthinking and false as that 
which urges every man to w^ork for the 
joy of working, — and which is cant even 
though it be uttered in stij-ring verse. In 
a city building there are seven men em- 
ployed whose work is this : on Monday 

[ loi ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

morning they begin on the ground floor, 
swabbing corridors, washing windows, 
polishing brass and iron; and it takes them 
precisely till Saturday night to progress in 
this cleansing manner — literally on their 
knees — to the top of the building. Then 
on Monday morning again they begin on 
the ground floor, each one with a fresh 
cake of soap and with no variation in the 
week's task before him. It does not seem 
to me possible for a man to work thus for 
the joy of working. 

Yet it is just this kind of dull, necessary 
obedience to an order or a routine that 
constitutes the work of nearly all human- 
ity. Under such conditions, any message 
to man that urges upon him the pure joy 
of labor must have a very complacent and 
superior sound. If ever there lived a boot- 
black whose chief happiness was in pro- 
ducing the most lustrous possible shine on 
the shoe of his patron, what a poor-spirited 
little prig he must have been ! how un- 
worthy beside his confreres who rejoiced 

[ 102 ] 



WORK AND PLAY 

to gamble away their pennies in the al- 
ley ! It is, of course, not wrong for the 
bootblack to take pleasure in the lustre of 
his shine, or for the clerk to have pride in 
the neatness of his page ; but if life holds 
for them no other pleasure quite so keen, 
they have lost the vital spark of manhood. 
And therefore it should be urged upon all 
those who perform the somnolent, me- 
chanical labor of long hours, day after day, 
listlessly and well, as most of the world's 
work is performed, to dream dreams and 
see visions and hearken even in the midst 
of their tasks for some passing whisper 
from the spirit of play. 



IV 
THE SMOKING-ROOM 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

The sanctity of masculine institutions is 
assailed. The male being's exclusive right 
to cast the ballot and to hold the office is 
challenged; with characteristic chivalry — 
in America — he lends to the challenger 
an indulgent ear ; with characteristic gen- 
erosity he makes unessential concessions. 
His privilege of drinking where and when 
he pleases — -a privilege which he had 
enjoyed since remote antiquity — is cur- 
tailed; it is even sought to deny him the 
seclusion appropriate to potation. The 
Boston barroom, for instance, is deprived 
of the shutter and the curtain — ordinary 
decencies of life. The canteen is abol- 
ished ; there is no Sunday beer. A mighty 
organization of persons of her own sex, un- 
mindful of the services she has rendered 
to literature, seeks to expunge the British 
barmaid. The W. C. T. U. — defined by 

[ 107 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

some one as the We See To You Society 
— flourishes the lash. Everywhere woman 
is awake and vigilant — impressed as never 
before with the truth that her mission is 
man. 

Easy-going and good-natured as man 
is, he has some power of resistance. Even 
though menaced by so formidable a foe, he 
feels no alarm for the future. He is secure 
in his independence so long as his possession 
of the smoking-room is not disputed. The 
function of this institution has been to ex- 
pand and enlarge the man, to encourage 
expression and self-revelation, to promote 
in him the sense of latitude and freedom 
which his unruly nature craves, and with- 
out proper nourishment of which he 
droops mentally and morally. For rugged 
growth he requires much unhampered in- 
terchange with persons of his own coarse 
fibre. Women charge the atmosphere at 
once with the electricity of criticism, — 
to which the juvenile is of course most 
sensitive. A personable young gentleman 

[ io8 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

recognizes instinctively the critical spirit 
and instinctively seeks to propitiate it by 
engaging behavior. He may be quite suc- 
cessful in his effort, but none the less does 
he require a refuge w^here he may soothe 
his agitated nerves, where he may discard 
self-consciousness in the presence of ex- 
perience. What the young man needs most 
is contact with his elders; likewise do the 
elders need contact with the young. No- 
where have the opportunities for this been 
so great as in the smoking-room. I am told 
that on certain new ocean liners women 
are privileged to invade this apartment. 
It is an invasion that can never prosper. 
The feminine sense of propriety is stronger 
than the feminine sense of curiosity — for- 
tunately for the human race ; after an in- 
spection from the doorway the brethren 
will be left in undisturbed possession. 
Otherwise, the brag, the broad humorous 
narrative, the acute discussion must be 
conducted in a cautious undertone ; the 
feminine presence is bound to devitalize 

[ 109 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

the company ; and the flavor which with 
adventurous interest the woman is eager 
to taste, she dissipates by her intrusion. 
No gain in upholstery could ever offset 
the loss of that privacy, that atmosphere 
which causes strangers to confide in one 
another, which induces fellowship and 
provides for enlargement by observation 
and experience. Let rawness and formal- 
ity of furnishing prevail, let the seats be 
clothed in gaudy coverings and fixed in 
an unbeguiling intimacy, let the carpets 
be adorned with numerous nickel-plated, 
shining utensils — in spite of all its ugliness 
the smoking-room is not to be superseded 
by any apartment which makes an appeal 
to the feminine taste and welcomes the 
feminine person. 

The total abstainer may best record, 
with a discriminating pen, the progress of 
the banquet at which good wine flows 
freely; he better than those whose blood 
and brains are stirred by drink may sep- 
arate the stages and bear away a clear 

[ "o] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

memory of broadening festivity. Those 
involved in subordinate parts of a great ac- 
tion make the least illuminating of chroni- 
clers, except in so far as their own small 
contribution to the final fact is concerned. 
The non-smoker who yet frequents the 
smoking-room has, in the same way, bet- 
ter opportunities for gathering data for a 
well-rounded commentary, one that shall 
embrace all the phases of smoking-room 
Hfe. The man who smokes is too soon 
submerged into a phase himself; for the 
commentator there is required a certain 
detachment and isolation. Therefore am 
I emboldened to offer my commentary. 

One who sits in a smoking-room and 
does not smoke is at a serious disadvantage 
socially. Many a pleasant acquaintance 
I have seen made over an interchange of 
opinions as to the relative merits of certain 
brands of cigarettes or tobacco ; this open- 
ing of opportunity has never been mine. 
One is congenitally a non-smoker, just as 
one is congenitally, it may be, a drunkard. 

[ III ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

We are all predisposed to certain habits and 
vices, and the vice of not smoking is one 
for which I have inherited a predilection. 
Sometimes, when I observe the pleasures 
and advantages which other men derive 
from the slight embellishment of their 
breathing processes, I am tempted to rebel 
against the ancestral impulse. Indeed the 
non-smoker is in conversation a man with- 
out resources; he presents a naked and 
embarrassed front; his every effort is noted 
and charged against him ; each shade of 
anxiety or apprehension, each glow of 
hope is advertised upon his face. He is 
a frank and emotional exhibit ; whereas a 
cigar in the mouth can impart shrewdness 
to a stupid countenance, self-possession to 
one that should be disturbed, an air of 
mystery to the blank — in short, he who 
has the art of smoking has always at hand 
a mask. Yet if there are disadvantages and 
humiliations in being a non-smoker, there 
are also immunities. The non-smoker pre- 
sents, it seems, the more forbidding aspect 

[112] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

to the bore. If he is of a contemplative 
habit of mind, he is not Ukely to have his 
musings interrupted by unwelcome de- 
mands upon his attention. 

This, at least, is a logical conclusion, yet 
a recent experience compels me to admit 
that the statement is recklessly complacent. 
I was occupying a seat in a well-filled 
smoking-car; when a man got in at a way 
station and came down the aisle, I made 
room for him. Being interested in a news- 
paper, I gave him no attention until he said 
loudly and abruptly, — 

"How are you going to vote?" 

I replied that I was not going to vote 
for a conspicuously odious candidate. 

"You're not?" he shouted in amaze- 
ment ; then he added confidentially yet 
loudly, " Say, I 'm not, either. Why 
should I vote for him ? Tell me that ; 
why should I vote for him ? What 's he 
ever done, I'd like to know? Answer 
me that, will you?" 

By that time I had concluded that this 

[ 1^3 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

conversational gentleman was in liquor, 
and I returned to the perusal of my news- 
paper. He continued in a voice which 
drew the attention of all the passengers in 
the vicinity, — 

** Why should I vote for him ? He 's 
not a married man. He 's got no children. 
Lives for himself alone. I 'm a married 
man — wife and six children — and I 
support 'em and educate 'em too. Why 
should I vote for a man with no responsi- 
bilities? Answer me that — if you please!'' 

The demand was so emphatic, the sub- 
sequent pause so intense, that I found it 
difficult to fix my mind on what I was 
reading. I was aware that the public in- 
terest in the situation was becoming more 
marked. 

" He says he stands for temperance. So 
do I stand for temperance. Temperance 
is a mighty good thing — always sup- 
ported it. But — it can be carried too far. 
That 's what he forgets ; it 's a good thing, 
but it can be carried too far." 

[ "4] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

I churlishly refrained from acquiescing 
in this sentiment. He was silent for a few 
moments — surveying me, I was aware, 
w^ith extreme disfavor. 

" Ain't you interested in what I 'm say- 
ing ? " he asked with loud defiance. 

There was no doubt of the interest of 
the others. 

"No,'' I said. 

He did not reply ; he turned his large 
bulk a little more towards me, and I knew 
that his eyes were coursing impudently up 
and down my frame. It was extremely 
difficult to keep my mind on the news- 
paper article. I glanced up and saw the 
faces of many men turned towards me, 
grinning, intent, joyously apprehensive. I 
resumed my reading. 

*'Say, do you know what I think of 
you?" 

Now I knew perfectly well that he 
thought my manners were bad ; but I 
said, without raising my eyes, '* No, and 
I don't care to know." 

[ >>5 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

The silence that ensued was ominous. 
I felt that he was gathering his powers of 
invective and that my fellow passengers 
were hanging over the backs of their seats, 
hungry for his vituperative words. At last 
speech came. 

" I am going to tell you what I think 
of you. You may not like it, but I 'm 
going to tell you just the same." He 
kept me in suspense for a dramatic mo- 
ment. And then, in the most measured, 
honeyed voice, " I think that I would 
trust you with my life. I think that you 
are the finest, the most genuine gentleman 
I ever saw. I think I would like to stand 
up and say to the people in this car that 
here is a gentleman I never saw before, 
but I would trust him with my life. 
That's what I think about you." 

I thanked him. But he was in that ob- 
sessed and obstinate condition which de- 
mands reiterated utterance. He adorned 
me once more with adulation, and men 
rose from their seats and gathered round 

[ "6] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

us in delight. I was presented to them as 
the charming unknown. When I left the 
train — which was fortunately soon — my 
admirer accompanied me to the door and 
bade me good-by from the platform. 

But this experience was for me excep- 
tional ; ordinarily I seem to repel rather 
than to attract the attention of the smoker. 
I have persuaded myself that there is no 
unflattering explanation of this, but rather 
that he who is without interest in tobacco 
lacks a primary and sympathetic interest 
for the lover of tobacco, and as an uncon- 
genial companion is ignored. So he is left 
free to meditate and to observe and to lis- 
ten. And although he is himself seldom 
tlie direct recipient, he is made aware that 
confidential and intimate bits of biography 
are being transmitted in corners and across 
tables; it entertains him to note the pro- 
cesses w^hich lead so rapidly to such a con- 
summation. Subtleties do not often pre- 
vail in the smoking-room — and usually 
it is the simple-minded, not the subtle. 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

who seeks a confidant. So abrupt are the 
introductions to the engrossing theme that 
sometimes the eavesdropper is astonished 
at the progress which in five minutes may 
be made by two well-disposed individuals. 
I was once reading in the smoking-room 
of a steamer ; a stout gentleman with a 
placid, good-humored face relapsed into 
the seat beside me and lighted a cigar. 
He became in all respects at once a figure 
of such comatose contentment that I as- 
sumed speech would disturb him ; I con- 
tinued therefore with my reading, and he 
of course made no advances. Presently a 
dyspeptic, morose-looking, thin man took 
the seat on the other side of him, a most 
unpromising neighbor. But immediately 
the stout gentleman gave indications that 
coma was no longer contentment ; he was 
stirring with an interest, an active desire. 
" Sir," he said, intercepting the other, 
who was reaching for a match, " before 
you light that cigar, would you do me the 
honor to try this of mine ? It 's a spe- 

[ '^8] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

cial importation, and I regard it as the 
finest cigar I ever tasted." 

The thin man's suspicious glance could 
detect nothing but benevolence in that 
beaming face. 

" You 're very good ; " he accepted the 
engaging cigar. '' It looks very superior ; 
I '11 be glad to try it." 

The fat gentleman watched the benefi- 
ciary during the first savoring puffs w^ith 
infantile eagerness. 

**Ah," he exclaimed in fine good hu- 
mor after a moment of anxiety, '' I knew 
I was n't mistaken ; I knew you were a 
judge of cigars. I can always tell from a 
man's look if he knows cigars." 

"Very perceptive," said the thin man. 
'' A most excellent cigar." 

" Nothing quite like a good cigar after 
dinner in your library, with a wife sitting 
there that doesn't mind the smoke," ven- 
tured the fat man. 

The thin man nodded ; he was a reluct- 
ant talker. 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

** Ever since my wife's death, smoking 's 
not been the same to me." The fat man 
sighed. '* I still enjoy it, but it ain't the 
same. You're married, I presume.?" 

''Yes." 

'' Any children?" 

-Two." 

"I'm not so fortunate. Been married 
twice, but no children. I heard it excel- 
lently well expressed the other day, — a 
man's wife is the bond, the children are 
the coupons." 

''That's one way of looking at it, cer- 
tainly," said the thin man. 

" I always carry a photograph of my 
wife — my second," observed the fat man 
presently. " I used to carry it in my watch, 
but I found it was getting scratched, so I 
had an envelope made for it ; I keep it in 
that now. I 'd like to show it to you." 

I expected him to search in his bosom ; 
he drew the picture, however, from his 
hip pocket. The thin man took it gin- 
gerly, and inspected it. 

[ 120 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

'* Oh — yes — very nice looking lady," 
he said at last. 

The proprietor of the photograph was 
satisfied, and as he returned it to its en- 
velope and then to its abiding-place, he 
remarked, — 

" She was the mate for me — if ever a 
man had one. My second. Died six years 
ago. I 've never had any desire to find a 
successor. Oh, I look at the ladies some- 
times and mention the possibility to my- 
self, but they none of 'em measure up with 
her — so I shake my head, no, no." 

" Well," said the thin man simply, ^' I 'm 
satisfied with my first wife. I hope I '11 
never have to think about a second." 

So he had a human side after all ; his 
unresponsiveness had been due probably 
to excess of caution. He and the fat man 
sat together often in the smoking-room 
thereafter ; indeed if one entered and did 
not see the other, a look hesitating and 
disconsolate would cross his face. Tobacco 
and domesticity had created a bond. I 

[ ■^> ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

know not what further intimacies were 
revealed ; generally the fat man was the 
talker, the thin man the listener ; they did 
not join in any of the card games, they did 
not contribute to the ribald narratives that 
often delighted a corner of the smoking- 
room ; they drew about themselves a little 
company of middle-aged, quiet persons, on 
whom the fat man beamed with the most 
unfailing good humor. Among them 
much sound doctrine was uttered, truisms 
and platitudes were given a solemn hear- 
ing ; but always there was something naive 
and quaint in their seriousness. Occasion- 
ally they engaged in literary discussion. 

" Multum in parvo,'' said the fat man 
once. "That's my conception of Shake- 
speare. Multum in parvo.'' 

" Shakespeare or the man that wrote 
the plays," remarked a heathen. 

"There was a fellow out to Detroit 
published a book saying Shakespeare was 
all a cipher,'* commented the fat man. 
" The masterpiece of English literature, 

[ 122 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

according to this Detroit gentleman, was 
just a blind — turned out to cover up the 
tracks of the scandals of the time ! Well, 
I don't believe it. And as for saying Bacon 
wrote Shakespeare — you might as well 
compare an elephant and a graceful ga- 
zelle — or Grover Cleveland's orations and 
Lincoln's Gettysburg speech." 

" Ah," said the heathen, " but how do 
you account — " 

And there the argument began. And 
where an argument begins, interest for all 
except the two disputants usually ends. 
Quite properly argument is not popular 
in the smoking-room. The person who 
delights in controversy seldom enlarges his 
audience. Once his tendency is revealed, 
people drift away from him to those whose 
forte is narrative. Or in preference they 
will even sit about and watch a man play- 
ing solitaire. 

The story-teller is the magnet of the 
smoking-room. Strangers making the 
acquaintance of one another desire to be 

[ 123 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

entertained and to be thought entertaining. 
Narrative is the resource of most men in 
this situation; only a few are endowed 
with the talent for casual, inconsequent, 
amusing talk, spontaneous, illuminating 
comment, the tact and restraint for letting 
pass a tempting but inappropriate oppor- 
tunity, and the intellectual opulence that 
can in an exigency provide a flow — that 
does not merely leak out in occasional 
sparkling interjections. I think that men 
who combine these happy qualities are 
often deficient in the embracing geniality 
which is essential to leadership in the 
smoking-room, and that they may sit sub- 
ordinate and overlooked. They shine per- 
haps more brightly in other realms. 

As his intimacy with his auditor in- 
creases, the story-teller tends to introduce 
personal experience into his narratives ; 
they become less often the small change 
of current anecdotes, more and more often 
the vehicle for self-revelation or advertise- 
ment. One cannot sit long in the smok- 

[ 124 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

ing-room without hearing raised some- 
where the bragging voice. There are a 
vast number of men who never outgrow 
the boyish wish to impress the stranger, 
who even predicate upon success in this 
matter the possibility of maintaining in- 
tercourse with him ; they must in the 
beginning assert their importance. Once 
they have demonstrated that, they may 
turn out to be modest persons enough, 
neither self-centred nor disposed to mo- 
nopolize the talk. There was a man I 
once knew who could not be an hour in 
the company of any one without impart- 
ing the information, shyly and awkwardly, 
that he had won a medal of honor for 
bravery in the Civil War. Having liber- 
ated this fact, he would relapse into his 
unobtrusive, quiet personality, receive the 
ideas of others with humility, venture his 
own in a deprecating way — a submissive 
soul, conscious always of his limitations. 
Once in his life it had befallen him to 
achieve something supreme ; thereafter he 

[ 1^5 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

had served, perhaps, a ** faithful failure." 
It seemed fitting enough that he should 
proclaim his solitary triumph, if he chose, 
and so protect himself from what would 
otherwise inevitably be a slighting estima- 
tion, perhaps exclusion. The ordinarily 
successful man is as apt to recommend 
himself by similar methods ; but as his 
achievement is of a more conventional 
sort, allusion to it may be more gracefully 
brought about. That he enjoys a large 
manner of life, or that he numbers persons 
of title or celebrity among his friends, or 
that he is improving an already prosperous 
business, he may indicate with a certain 
indirectness of which the Civil War hero 
could seldom avail himself. The man 
who resorts to such methods for the pro- 
motion of his social interests, in the smok- 
ing-room or elsewhere, must often be 
troubled by a dim perception that his 
capital is small. His actual achievement 
on which he prides himself, to which he 
refers for guarantee, may be a constant 

[ 126] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

producer of revenue, yet as an achievement 
be as momentary, as obsolete as the vet- 
eran's act of valor. The business man's 
success is often based on one admirable 
creative episode, let us say ; thereafter it 
declines upon inglorious routine. And the 
early confidence that is shared with the 
stranger as to income or imposing intima- 
cies with the great may incidentally pro- 
claim a rather shrinking, shame-faced con- 
sciousness of subsequent inadequacy. The 
feeling that one must put one's best foot 
forward and if possible get a running start, 
imparts an aggressive demeanor to some 
essentially cautious and conservative souls. 
So if one's impression of the smoking-room 
is of a place reverberating with the inor- 
dinate self-glorification of its occupants — 
as sometimes is the case — let it be charita- 
bly remembered that though the mouth 
be bold and blatant, a heart that is anxious 
of acceptance is often throbbing in the 
throat. 

Sometimes indeed the brag is so ingen- 

[ 1^7 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

uous and so conjoined with confession as 
to be quite disarming. A big man of the 
type of the prosperous barkeeper — dia- 
mond rings and shirt-stud, stubbly pompa- 
dour hair, heavy red jowls, and little eyes 
— was, on a return trip from Europe, 
expressing his bewilderment at the Amer- 
ican eagerness for travel. ** London, Paris, 
and Vienna — I seen them all, and what 
is there in one of 'em that little old New 
York can't beat in a showdown ? I '11 dance 
a clog for joy when I hit the Broadway 
pave again. There 's just as good stores 
along that fine little thoroughfare as there 
is on Regent Street in London, Rue de la 
Paix in Paris, and what-you-may-call-it in 
Vienna. And if you get stung in Amer- 
ica, you get stung by a self-respecting, in- 
dependent Christian, not by a grovelling 
worm that don't throw no more chest 
than a Chink. Gee, I wanted to trample 
on some of them fellows sometimes. In 
England I felt ashamed of my Anglo- 
Saxon blood, to see how full-grown men 

[ '28 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

could act. The hotel porter holds the 
door open for me when I go out, and he 
says, ' Thank you, sir.' I tell a cabby to 
drive me to the Carlton, and he says, 

* Thank you, sir.' The waiter passes me 
the bread, and when I take it, he says, 

* Thank you, sir.' ' Look here,' I says to 
one of these fellows, * you've got a bad 
habit of thanking a person in advance. 
Wait till you get it. Or are you trying to 
be funny ? ' Well, I always thought the 
Germans were an upstanding people. But 
the only word I heard all over Germany 
was ' Bitte.' When I 'd get into the hotel 
elevator the guy in uniform — a fam- 
ily man with sideburns and moustache — 
would say, ' Bitte,' and lift his cap to me. 
Lift it, mind you, clean off his head, not 
just tip it. And before he 'd let me out of 
the cage, he 'd always have to say ' Bitte ' 
and lift his cap again. It was an awful 
waste of time and manners. I knew there 
wasn't anything sincere about it — just a 
play for graft. I like a pirate that comes 

[ 129 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

out into the open and puts on a front — 
the way we do at home ; give me the 
newsboy that calls me ' Charley ' and asks 
me for a match. And say ; you talk about 
comforts ! Out to my house I 've got a 
big room with a great big porcelain tub 
and nickel fittings and a tiled floor and a 
needle shower, and when I get back there 
I 'm going to shut myself in and turn 
on all the faucets and just splash for about 
two days. Anfl I'm going to have griddle 
cakes and waffles for breakfast. And I 'm 
going to ride up and down all day in a sky- 
scraper elevator — one that goes with a 
jump and makes the blood sort of blush up 
all through you when it starts. I 'm going 
to have excitement and comfort every 
moment. I 'm going to carry my own 
bag and not worry myself sick for fear I 
have n't enough foolish money in my pock- 
ets to pass round to every one that wears 
a uniform or a dress suit. I 'm going to 
spend my Sundays down to my place on 
the beach ; the house ain't a French cha- 

[ 130 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

teau, but it 's practical and to my mind it 
has considerable ornament. Sundays there 
we can auto in the morning and play bridge 
in the afternoon, and have cocktails before 
lunch and dinner. Ever spend a Sunday in 
England? Oh say ! Spare me ! " 

'* Well, that 's right,'' agreed another 
American. " But you must acknowledge 
that there are some fine old buildings and 
ruins, such as we can't show." 

** Ruins ! Me and my wife drove out 
from Warwick one day — say, why do 
they call it * Warrick ' when they spell it 
with a w^ — and took in Kensilworth 
Castle, is it ? It was an awful hot day, and 
it was certainly the most ruined thing I 
ever saw. After about eight minute^ I says 
to my wife, ' Well, what 's the use ? We '11 
forget it all any way in a week — so let 's 
go and have some beer.' So we got into 
our carriage and had the coachman drive 
us across the road to a little inn; they 
sold postcards with views of the ruins 
there, and I bought a handful and told 

[ '31 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

my wife to send 'em off to her friends so 
they'd know what we were seeing; and 
while she done that, I unbuttoned my vest 
and put down four bottles of beer." 

Laughter followed and then an interval 
of silence, upon which emerged from 
another corner of the room an enthusias- 
tic, fluting voice, saying, — 

'' My dear fellow, ' Pelleas and Meli- 
sande,' with Debussy's music, is the most 
ravishingly beautiful, the most enchanting 
thing I ever saw or heard." — 

The smoking-room of a steamer is a 
place of contrasts and of various activities. 
The dominating element is likely to be 
a noisy sporting fraternity. The bridge- 
players and the poker-players establish early 
a fellowship which is cemented by the op- 
portunities to gamble on the daily run of 
the ship. Others of more sober tendencies 
find relaxation in solitaire, in checkers or 
backgammon ; there is no game so dull 
that it will not draw critical spectators. 
An informality prevails which makes it 

[ 132 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

quite proper to look over the shoulder of 
a player and derive an opinion as to his 
mental processes, or to benefit him by a 
friendly suggestion when he is puzzled in 
his solitaire. With the same freedom an 
exuberant victor will issue a challenge to 
the crowd ; an unconquerable checker- 
player, who by his astonishing skill and 
fertility had attracted a group of admirers, 
was encouraging a fresh opponent : '* Well, 
well ; it looks to me as if here was some 
one who knew something about the game 
— but let's try this. Hello! that's a 
crafty move, isn't it ? I guess he thinks he 
has me in a hole — but I wonder what 
will happen now. — What! going to let 
me take three of your men for one of 
mine; do you think that's good policy? 
But you're right — seems to be no other 
way out of it for you, is there?" In two 
or three more moves he had annihilated — 
with compassionate comment — his an- 
tagonist ; and the little audience stood by 
sniggering. 

[ 133 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

" But I 'd like to see some one lick you/* 
observed a spectator. '* You are so darned 
cocky about your game." The champion 
laughed. " If you feel that way, I 've got 
to do something to be popular. Steward ! 
Ask the gentlemen what they '11 have." 

It is true that the good humor and 
geniality of the smoking-room are not 
universal. Pretty nearly always there are 
individuals or groups of individuals who 
take a furious dislike to one another at the 
start ; and out of these instinctive enmi- 
ties ill-natured gossip is sometimes born. 
Particularly is this true of the youthful ; 
their standards of conduct and of manners 
are very unyielding, very high ; the faculty 
in which they excel is that of condemna- 
tion ; and in the leisure which they have 
for criticism they endeavor to substantiate 
their immediate prejudices and antipathies. 
Nothing is more amusing or irritating, 
according to one's philosophy, than their 
positive conclusions with regard to the 
character of those whom they do not 

[ 134] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

know ; nothing is more agreeable than the 
enthusiasm with which on a little know- 
ledge they recant and retract. 

One aspect of the smoking-room is to 
be touched upon as lightly, as regretfully 
as is compatible with truth, yet not with 
entire deprecation, — that aspect which it 
wears at times when men are grouped to- 
gether in a corner, heads down, listening 
intently, while one speaks in a subdued 
voice. The smiling silence, then the loud 
guffaw — no doubt it is true that only 
man is vile. Yet I believe that in a mature 
audience no serious harm is ever done by 
the story that arouses honest laughter. 
The potency of such laughter is for good, 
no matter what its origin. If the "smok- 
ing-room story," as a certain type of 
narrative has been labelled, does not pro- 
voke honest laughter, it has done harm — 
to the narrator if to no one else. And 
when, in the expressive vernacular, a story 
of this sort receives a " frost," the lesson 
administered is stern ; the humiliation is 

[ 135 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

enough to make others wary of risking a 
similar rebuff. A somewhat forward per- 
son never, I thought, during the whole 
voyage quite regained his normal assertive- 
ness, which he lost on the second day out 
— Sunday. He was sitting that morning 
in the smoking-room; someone asked him 
if he was going down to the church service. 
'' Oh yes," he answered comfortably and 
loudly, so that all might hear, and he con- 
tinued, " I go to church every Sunday ; I 
don't mind it at all. I go with my wife ; I 
like to sing the hymns and see the ladies in 
their Sunday toggery ; and then afterwards 
on the way home I leave my wife and 
stop in at the club ; quite a lot of the boys 
have the habit of doing that ; and we sit 
round and swap stories for an hour before 
lunch. Pick up some mighty good ones 
now and then." And forthwith he related 
to the company a specimen. It was re- 
ceived with gravity ; the narrator flushed ; 
it was all very painful and salutary. 

The sm'oking-room is indeed a school 

[ 136 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

of manners. Its devotees are not fastidious, 
but neither are they of blunted sensibili- 
ties. The vulgar learn from the gentle, 
and the gentle learn from the vulgar. The 
art of smoking tends to cultivate a spirit 
of generosity ; there is a brotherhood 
of feeling which provides tacitly that 
he whose tobacco pouch is full shall 
share with him whose pouch is empty; 
and this generosity in dealing with ma- 
terial possessions accompanies a generos- 
ity in dealing with ideas. No place is 
more democratic ; nowhere do men more 
earnestly seek to meet each other upon 
common ground. The smoking-room in- 
spires one with contentment in masculine 
resources. The more one habituates one's 
self to its atmosphere, the more pleasant 
and satisfying does it become. The spell 
of feminine society grows less and less 
potent to the smoking-room philosopher. 
His comfort is provided for, a little play 
goes on before his eyes, indeterminate and 
fragmentary but amusing, the characters 

[ '37 ] 



THE SMOKING-ROOM 

of those who are in reminiscent mood un- 
consciously unfold, oddities, eccentricities, 
and absurdities are revealed, enthusiasms 
that animate the heart of age and griev- 
ances that vex the heart of youth entertain 
him with their humor ; and if in his pre- 
occupation with these trivialities, — the sum 
of which may mean an appreciable wis- 
dom, — he neglects more and more those 
finer moods that may never be awakened 
in the smoking-room or in the compan- 
ionship of those who frequent it, — well, 
he is generally a rubicund old bachelor 
who had his ideal of charm long ago and 
pursued it till it vanished. 



V 
CYNICISM 



CYNICISM 

One of the seeming waywardnesses of our 
human nature is the respect for a cynic that 
lurks in nearly every heart. The respect is 
not for his character, certainly not for his 
disposition ; but it goes out to him as a 
man of intellect, and is often dispropor- 
tionate to his ability. To hear that a man 
is cynical is to accept him as of superior 
intelligence. There is a universal deference 
to what is universally deemed an unlovely 
and undesirable attitude of mind. The en- 
trance of the cynic into the drawing-room 
produces an air of expectant interest ; his 
rancorous comments are received as admir- 
able wit. So, at least, according to the 
contemporary novels of society; so, even, 
— though in a somewhat less obvious and 
artificial manner, — according to one's own 
observation. We all find more interesting 
the person who discusses his friend's fail- 

[ '41 ] 



CYNICISM 

ings than him who dwells upon his friend's 
virtues. We do not like the cynic better, 
but we regard him as the more penetrat- 
ing and the better informed. 

Hence we find him excellent company. 
For instance: Brown takes pains to make 
a pleasant impression on those whom he 
meets, and, in the ordinary relations of life, 
gets on with his acquaintances and friends 
very comfortably. When, therefore, the^ 
cynical observer shrugs his shoulders and 
intimates something to Brown's discredit, 
the idea has for those who know Brown 
the charm of novelty, and adorns him with 
a new interest. Having never before held 
him in discredit, they feel that his detractor 
has got below the surface. The conviction 
is strengthened by the cynic's air of men- 
tal reservation, his unwillingness to utter 
definitely what he knows, his manner that 
implies, "Oh yes, all very well, but I could 
tell things if I would." 

This, however, is not the only cause 
that contributes to the general deference. 

[ H2 ] 



CYNICISM 

If one man declares a person to be charm- 
ing, fascinating, or delightful, and another 
pronounces him disgusting, repulsive, or 
intolerable, who makes the more profound 
impression? The language of enthusiasm 
is emasculate compared with that of hatred 
or contempt. A sufficient reason for the 
undemonstrative nature of the English- 
speaking race lies in the effeminate quality 
of the adjectives that denote admirable 
traits. Some of them can hardly be uttered 
without a consciousness of a loss of virility. 
One has only to contrast with them the 
hearty gusto of our vocabulary of dislike 
and depreciation to perceive the tremen- 
dous advantage that the cynic enjoys. 

His very name supports his pretensions 
to a superior intelligence. " Cynic," for 
all that it meant originally "doglike," is 
an aristocratic word. One is not prone to 
think of coal heavers, sailors, miners, as 
cynics ; it has probably occurred to but 
few that their grocers and butchers are 
cynics. The word is erudite and Greek ; 

[ H3 ] 



CYNICISM 

the presumption is that the man designated 
by a term of such distinguished lineage is 
of education and intelligence. We have 
a habit of deriving ideas in this illogical 
way. The cynics in the humbler walks 
of life are not regarded as cynics, but as 
men soured and disappointed. And when 
we hear of one that he is soured and dis- 
appointed, we do not instinctively pay 
tribute to his intelligence. 

Is there, then, no wisdom in cynicism, 
no virtue in disbelief? Does the undoubted 
suggestion of intelligence which the word 
implies rest entirely upon such trivial 
and empty grounds ? Unquestionably the 
inner respect which persists, notwithstand- 
ing the superficial condemnation, proceeds 
from a dim recognition of certain useful 
services that cynicism does perform. An 
attempt to discover these and set them 
forth fairly need not disturb even the most 
believing. 

A reasonable cynicism affords recreation 
to the mind. A man may always, with 

[ 144 ] 



CYNICISM 

advantage to his mental health, indulge 
in a cynicism as a hobby ; he may, for 
instance, be cynical of women, or news- 
papers, or party politics, or the publishers 
of novels, and be the better for it. But he 
is in a serious state if his cynicism includes 
women and newspapers and party politics 
^Wthe publishers of novels. Then, indeed, 
is his outlook bleak and barren, and in 
all probability he lives and works only to 
malign ends. 

Nearly all sane, normal people, how- 
ever, enjoy one cynicism by way of diver- 
sion. It is, indeed, essential to character to 
have some object at which to scoff, swear, 
or sneer. Cynicism is never a native qual- 
ity of the mind ; it always has its birth in 
some unhappy experience. The young 
man finds that the girl who has gathered 
up for him all the harmony and melody 
of earth rings hollow at the test ; and he 
drops his lyrical language and becomes 
cynical of women. The citizen of Boston 
has naturally grown cynical of newspapers. 

[ H5 ] 



CYNICISM 

The candidate for public office who has 
been definitely retired to private life by 
being " knifed '' at the polls distrusts party 
politics. A man reads the advertisement of 
a novel, then reads the novel, and thence- 
forth is cynical of the publishers of novels. 
Yet these misfortunes have their salutary 
aspect. The disappointed lover, general- 
izing bitterly upon the sex, is not always 
implacable ; a cooler judgment tempers 
and restores his passion, gives it another 
object, and so guides him to a safer, if 
less gusty and emotional love. The citizen 
of Boston, the betrayed candidate, the 
misled and disappointed reader, all have 
for their condition, even though they know 
it not, a valuable compensation ; for the 
very experience that has brought them to 
this pass of reasonable cynicism has stirred 
their indignation ; yes, in spite of their 
seeming inertness, indignation is now 
smouldering. And this is a great force ; 
slow though it may be to start the wheels 
of machinery, it is still an important fuel 

[ 146 ] 



CYNICISM 

in keeping alive the fires under the boilers 
of civilization. The faculty of it becomes 
dulled by disuse, and is the more alert and 
righteous for a little rasping. Hew impres- 
sive and commanding a quality in a man is 
that of a great potential indignation ! It 
is essential to the chieftain. He may never 
show more than the flash of an eye, yet 
that will serve. And such power of in- 
dignation never came to one who had not 
penetrated some large bland sham, and 
learned thereby to hate and disbelieve all 
its seductive kindred. 

In supplying one with a theme for in- 
dignation, the turn toward cynicism fur- 
nishes also an additional amusement and 
charm. If a man is in the habit, for ex- 
ample, of expecting nothing but tales of 
murder, suicide, and scandal on the first 
page of his newspaper, he becomes actually 
pleased at the rich daily reward of his ex- 
pectations. "Scurrilous sheet! " he cries, 
striking it with open palm. To behold, 
morning after morning, its recurring of- 

[ H7 ] 



CYNICISM 

fensiveness and hypocrisy, to feel that there 
are less discerning persons who approve of 
the very features that make it despicable, 
and to exclaim to himself, " So this is what 
the public likes! " brings him each time 
a curious satisfaction. Perhaps it is merely 
the satisfaction of a small gratified vanity, 
but it enables him to begin his day in a 
comfortable frame of mind ; he is pre- 
pared to snarl only at newspapers. It is 
desirable that every man should have a 
small vanity gratified daily; it keeps him 
in good temper with himself and the world. 
And to observe small vanities and foibles 
in others performs this service, since a man 
always absolves himself from sharing the 
weaknesses that he sees. 

Yet cynicism has a more valuable end 
than merely to amuse. It is a means to- 
ward sturdiness and independence in a 
man; it quickens his activities, and pre- 
vents a too ready acceptance of existing 
conditions. It is almost necessary to im- 
portant achievement. The reverential 

[ h8 ] 



CYNICISM 

frame of mind is inefficient when con- 
fronted with the world's work ; too much 
in the problems of life demands not to be 
reverenced, but to be cursed. There can 
be no useful and permanent building up 
without a clearing of the site ; old foun- 
dations and debris have to be swept away. 
The man of reverential mind, who has 
no touch of cynicism, is unfit for this 
work. He is unfit, for instance, to serve 
as district attorney in one of our large 
cities, — - as useful a function as an edu- 
cated man may perform, yet one in the 
performance of which the man of entirely 
reverential spirit would be harmfully em- 
ployed. The reverential spirit, contem- 
plative of the established order, crowds 
out capacity for initiative ; the cynical 
spirit, scouting the established order, stim- 
ulates initiative. Of this spirit have been 
the great reformers, men for whom Swift, 
in defining his own life, has supplied a 
motto : ** The chief end of all my labor 
is to vex the world rather than to divert 

[ H9 ] 



CYNICISM 

it." It was characteristic of Cromwell 
that in dissolving the Long Parliament he 
should display a wanton cynicism. '* My 
Lord General, lifting the sacred mace 
itself, said, * What shall we do with this 
bauble ? Take it away ! ' " The scorn 
with which he disposed of the revered 
symbol of majesty was in itself symbolic ; 
as the Cavalier had been cynical of the 
Puritan's piety, so was the Puritan cynical 
of the pomp and trappings of the Cavalier. 
The great rulers, like the great reform- 
ers, have had the cynical sense, and have in 
the same way derived from it, not paraly- 
sis, but an effective recklessness. Louis 
XIV, most brilliant of monarchs, observed 
in making an appointment to office, " J'ai 
fait dix mecontents et un ingrat." And 
he continued to appoint whom he pleased. 
Frederick the Great was the pupil of Vol- 
taire ; and when a Board of Religion came 
to him with a complaint that certain 
Roman Catholic schools were used for sec- 
tarian purposes, he bade them remember 

[ '50] 



CYNICISM 

that "in this country every man must get 
to heaven his own way." The ruthless 
cynicism of Peter the Great was supple- 
mented by the splendid constructive hope- 
fulness from which issued his saying, '* I 
built St. Petersburg as a window to let in 
the light of Europe." 

Yet we need not go to history for illus- 
tration ; even in one's own experience it 
is not difficult to note the efficiency which 
a vein of cynicism, properly combined 
with other qualities, gives a man. Those 
who are regarded as successful, or as being 
on the road to success, are cheerful, hope- 
ful persons, with just this slightly cynical 
outlook. Those who have failed, or are 
failing, are just as surely the utterly cyni- 
cal, the decayed, querulous, and embittered, 
or the supremely reverential, who have 
too much respect for things as they are to 
undertake any alteration. These are the 
indolent; they may work hard all their 
lives, yet are they none the less indolent 
mentally, and unalert. 

[ 'SI ] 



CYNICISM 

There is, indeed, what may be called 
the cynical sense, not to be confused with 
the sense of humor, though akin to it. It 
is this which enables a man to keep out of 
the stock market, and even more, to look 
without jealousy on the achievements of 
those who are in the stock market. It is 
the antiseptic sense. So far from promot- 
ing envy, malice, and uncharitableness, it is 
allied with sympathy. For sympathy means 
understanding, and there can be no true 
understanding if one does not detect the 
weaknesses as well as the virtues ; without 
this cynical sense, one has not humanity. 
It gives a man a lively and discriminat- 
ing interest in life; it guards him against 
the paralyzing vice of hero-worship, — 
which is a virtue only in the young and 
immature, — and against the more sinful 
fault of arrogance toward the dejected and 
beaten. For just as it enables him to see 
how trivial are even the greatest achieve- 
ments of human ingenuity and labor, with 
what little loss the work of even the best 

[ 152] 



CYNICISM 

and wisest might have been omitted in the 
progress of the world, so, also, it prevents 
him from being unduly scornful of those 
who have accomplished — for all that ap- 
pears on the surface — nothing. Seeing a 
man who has failed, the cynically minded 
wonders what accidents of birth and cir- 
cumstance imposed his fruitlessness upon 
him ; seeing a man who has succeeded, the 
cynic wonders if he had done so without 
the innumerable reinforcements of chance. 
If this view tends toward fatalism, so does 
it also toward democracy. 

Yet one's cynicism must always be tem- 
pered in its sentiment and limited in its 
scope. A man may profitably be cynical 
of women, yet his faith and loyalty to at 
least one woman — his mother, or his 
sister, or the woman he loves — must be 
unswerving and unquestioning. A man 
may not be cynical of children or with 
children. He cannot be cynical of friends 
and keep them. He must not grow cyni- 
cal of himself, for then nothing remains. 

[ ^53 ] 



CYNICISM 

And the danger of cynicism is that once 
admitted into a man it may grow, appro- 
priating one after another of his channels 
and outlets, narrowing his hopes and en- 
thusiasms, until finally it rots the man 
himself. 

Reasonably limited and kept within 
bounds, it is a source of strength to a man 
rather than of weakness ; it gives him an 
independent and self-respecting point of 
view ; it berates him if he tends toward a 
weak sentimentality ; it is the companion 
of a cheerful levity. Take their cynical 
outlook away from Heine and Goethe and 
Victor Hugo, from Swift and Johnson and 
Franklin, — and how flavorless would be 
what remained ! How insipid would be 
a literature in which wit and humor had 
to disport themselves entirely among the 
pleasants facts of life ! 



VI 

THE QUIET MAN 



THE QUIET MAN 

At college it was always easy to create 
a prepossession in favor of a man by re- 
commending him as a "nice, quiet sort of 
fellow.'' In the case of the athlete who 
had demonstrated his vitality and manly 
qualities, the reason for this prepossession 
was clear ; the declaration of his friends 
was an assurance that his head had not 
been turned by his achievements, and that 
he was modest and unassertive. But it 
always seemed to me singular that so neg- 
ative a statement should so generally have 
guaranteed the worth of one of whom 
little else was known. Even in the larger 
world outside of college, the same guar- 
antee holds good ; let a stranger in a city 
have but one friend who makes it known 
that he is a '' nice, quiet sort of fellow," 
and he will not lack for a welcome. 
Yet many of the primary and obvious 

[ ^57 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

reasons for quietness in a man are not 
prepossessing. It may be that he is a weak- 
ling ; bullied because of his lack of strength 
in the Spartan age of boyhood, he has had 
fixed upon him the habit of timidity and 
self-effacement. Or he may be stupid, yet 
with just enough intelligence to perceive 
his dulness and so to be dumb. Or he 
may by nature be one of those passionless, 
unenthusiastic, indifferent creatures who 
find sufficient occupation in buttoning on 
their clothes in the morning and unbut- 
toning them at night, eating their three 
meals and going through the daily routine 
work or routine idleness to which neces- 
sity or circumstance has accustomed them. 
The classification is incomplete ; there are 
quiet men who are not weaklings, who 
are not stupid, who are enthusiastic, men 
of firm will and steadfast purpose. But if 
we pass over these for the present, it will 
appear that the self-control practised by 
quiet persons had oftentimes better give 
place to self-abandon, and that many a 

[ 158 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

man is respected for his restraint when he 
should be pitied for his diffidence. There 
is, for instance, the case of one whose quiet 
ways have resulted from a sense of physi- 
cal inferiority in boyhood. 

No matter what victories may be at- 
tained in the development of character, 
the point of view and the manner that 
were fixed in the early formative years 
are never quite discarded. The boy who 
has less strength than his fellows, less 
athletic skill, and yet admires and longs 
for these possessions, invites only too often 
demonstrations upon himself of the vigor 
and prowess that he covets. A boy likes 
above all things to show his power over 
another boy ; and the most instant method 
is by putting him down and sitting on 
him, or by seizing his wrist and twisting 
it till he howls, or by gripping the back 
of his neck and forcing him to march 
whither the tyrant wills. Once the un- 
lucky weakling is discovered and his sus- 
ceptibility to teasing exposed, he becomes 

[ 159 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

the plaything of his stronger mates. The 
amusement is the greater if he resents it 
with spirit, the keener if he has a sensi- 
tiveness which is hurt by the abuse, the 
more frequently invited if he has the fatal 
admiration for deeds of strength, and 
haunts, in spite of its terrors, the society 
of those who can perform them. His 
spirit is not crushed, but it learns discre- 
tion; his sensitiveness grows into a shy 
and morbid pride ; he likes to look on 
at better men, and to know them, but he 
finds it wise to be inconspicuous, inasmuch 
as to draw attention to himself usually 
means to suffer from a display of the very 
abilities which he admires. 

And out of this what results ? He ac- 
quires the habit of looking on and being 
socially inconspicuous. He may have en- 
ergies that in the end win for him emi- 
nence, but he will probably be to the end 
a shy and quiet man. It is not necessary 
that a boy should be a weakling to arrive 
at this development ; some trifling pecu- 

[ i6o] 



THE QUIET MAN 

liarity, a curious quality of voice, or a ner- 
vous and easily mimicked laugh, or an 
alien accent may suffice to create in him 
an undue tendency to hold his tongue. I 
know one man who attributes his ''cursed 
quietness " to an ailment of the throat 
that he had when a boy, and that made 
his speech husky and often liable to break 
down. Another thinks he is quiet because 
he never could sing ; nearly always in any 
gathering in which he found himself, 
there was singing, and he, utterly with- 
out the musical sense, sat and contributed 
nothing. This inability in expression ex- 
tended even to his speech ; he could not 
manage his voice to tell a story effectively, 
and though no one has a keener apprecia- 
tion of the humorous or dramatic, no one 
is less able than he to realize it in his 
talk. 

Then there are the humble-minded peo- 
ple who fancy themselves too dull or too 
uninformed to be interesting, and who cut 
themselves off from sharing freely with 

[ i6i ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

others their thoughts and opinions. Often 
they do themselves scant justice in their 
modesty, and win all the more on that 
account the regard of the few who come 
near enough to know them. But they are 
always understood of but few, and they 
are bottled-up people, a nervous, self-con- 
scious, timorous folk, of pleasant disposi- 
tion and much sentiment, who seldom cut 
any large figure in the world. 

The others, who really are dull and 
without being oppressed by the knowledge 
preserve a befitting retirement, constitute 
perhaps a majority of the quiet men. To 
be dull is certainly not to be disliked; and 
yet I question if any one of this numerous, 
agreeable, and necessary company quite 
fills out the original mental picture sum- 
moned by the recommendation, — "a nice, 
quiet sort of fellow." For the phrase sug- 
gests a man who has reserves of thought 
or knowledge or moral force. Indeed, we 
often follow up the designation, as thus: 
" A nice, quiet sort of fellow, with a lot 

[ 162 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

to him." On closer acquaintance, we are 
likely to find that his quietness proceeds 
from lack of strong convictions rather than 
from moral force, or from mere empty- 
headedness rather than from thoughts too 
deep to share. We come to think him a 
man with a receptive habit but little as- 
similative power. He listens but does not 
learn. It seems to be a sort of mental and 
moral dyspepsia from which he suffers. 

Let us suppose, however, that it is 
neither lack of ideas nor ill digestion of 
ideas which renders him a quiet man, but 
that he is indeed a person "with a lot to 
him/' Then, usually, he is the man of one 
idea. It is rare that he has versatility. He 
is the small inventor or the mechanician, 
whose mind on being diverted from the 
study of wheels and cogs can in no other 
sense be diverted; it is cold alike to Shake- 
speare and to baseball. He is the young 
poet of good impulses and a little talent, 
toying with his lyric and indifferent to the 
science of the stars, of the green and grow- 

[ 163 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

ing things about him, and to the business 
and endeavors of his active fellow men. 
He is the lawyer who makes a career out 
of ingenuity in splitting hairs; he is the 
business man who carries his ledgers home 
with him at night; he is any man who, 
by his devotion to an abstract principle or 
problem, or to a material fact, neglects his 
relations with nature and with men. If 
the principle is important and appeals to 
a missionary and reforming conscience, and 
if the man has power, he is not admitted 
to fellowship among the quiet, but accord- 
ing to one's point of view is hailed as a 
hero or denounced as a crank, a nuisance, 
or a fool. 

Of the many small people involved in 
their struggle with one idea, and aban- 
doned to their solitary interest, Emerson 
has supplied a phrase that may be appro- 
priated for definition. They are Mere 
Thinkers, as contrasted with Man Think- 
ing. In them the human element is defi- 
cient. They may have an absorbed interest 

[ 164 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

in their one pursuit, perhaps even a kind 
of dry and laudable enthusiasm; in their 
narrow range their souls may have con- 
flicts with the devil and issue worthily; but 
they are not the men of rich and generous 
nature, whose ideas take form in action, 
and who in action strike out fresh ideas. 
Man Thinking is man alert, versatile, liv- 
ing, — which is to say, finding constantly 
new interest in the things and beings about 
him, and developing himself more and 
more by the contact. From the ranks of 
Man Thinking emerge most of the strong 
and virile, the men of burly laughter, ob- 
serving and remembering eye, and care- 
less, wide-ranging talk; the unhoarded, 
chance-flung anecdote, the unconsciously 
graphic phrase, the crisp expression of a 
truth shrewdly seen drop from the lips of 
Man Thinking, not from those of Mere 
Thinker. One Mere Thinker in a million 
may some time evolve by mathematical 
and intellectual processes a machine of 
more than mathematical, even of human 

[ 165 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

value ; yet even then it is Man Thinking 
who will perfect it, and manufacture it, 
and advertise it, and sell it, and secure to 
the world at large — and to Man Think- 
ing in particular — its benefits. So Man 
Thinking is never quiet ; he is bustling, 
urging, cajoling, threatening, flinging 
his arms about, or battering with heavy, 
hostile fists ; and in his leisure moments 
pouring out prodigally, for whoever may 
pass, his amazed or delighted or pained 
impressions, — just like an earnest, excited 
child. 

And meanwhile the quiet man, — 
Mere Thinker. Hear Emerson : " Meek 
young men grow up in libraries, believing 
it their duty to accept the views which 
Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have 
given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and 
Bacon were only young men in libraries 
when they wrote these books. Hence, 
instead of Man Thinking, we have the 
bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, 
who value books as such. . . . Hence, 

[ ^66] 



THE QUIET MAN 

the restorers of readings, the emendators, 
the bibliomaniacs of all degrees." 

The narrowness and inertia of the quiet 
man are frequently moral as well as men- 
tal. He is firm on the point of certain 
things which he will not do, but his virtue 
is too likely to be of this negative quality ; 
and while his noisy and active brother 
is blundering about, learning what life is, 
perhaps heaping up sins and offences, 
yet also building himself in his heed- 
less, casual way monuments of good. Mere 
Thinker, with eyes upon the ground, 
treads the barren path of the dull preci- 
sian. Since he is quiet, he receives credit 
for virtues if he does not exhibit boldly 
their antithetic vices. Loyalty and stead- 
fastness and a good domestic nature are 
the excellent qualities most often attrib- 
uted to him. Yet as to the first of these, 
can any one doubt the truth of Stevenson's 
words : " A man may have sat in a room 
for hours and not opened his teeth, and 
yet come out of that room a disloyal 

[ 167 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

friend or a vile calumniator" ? The quiet 
friend may be as faithful as the vociferous, 
but there should be no presumption in 
his favor, for his very habit of life is in- 
sidious, and tends to breed the germs of 
doubt if not disloyalty. The looker-on is 
usually the man dissatisfied with idleness 
and critical of the activity of others. Be- 
cause it might draw upon him compari- 
son to his disadvantage, he does not utter 
freely his carping criticism of the active ; 
but he bears in mind how much better he 
himself would do this or that if it were 
not for some forbidding circumstance. 
And this habit of comparing himself with 
others, which is one of the common re- 
creations of the quiet man, sometimes, no 
doubt, begets the envy which makes it 
easy to betray. 

Even his unquestioned domesticity may 
not be so comprehensive a virtue. To sup- 
port some one besides himself in decency 
and honor is not all that a man should 
strive to do, though it is much. He should 

[ i68 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

also feel the obligation to bring gayety 
into the lives of those whom he loves. 
It is possible for some men by sheer earn- 
ing power to provide their families with 
opportunities for travel and amusement 
and adventure. But the earning power of 
the majority is limited in these matters ; 
and all the more is it necessary then for 
the man to bring variety and a cheerful 
activity and liveliness into his house. The 
fact that the routine of the day has been 
dull does not excuse him for being glum 
and silent at his evening meal. And too 
much of the quietness in the world is but 
the habit of a listless and brooding selfish- 
ness. 

It would be wanton to make these ex- 
posures and not offer a remedy. Here is 
a suggestion for the quiet man : *' Learn 
to make a noise." 

It is not enough that he should celebrate 
the Fourth of July each year in the cus- 
tomary manner, — though he may find 
even that barbarous observance beneficial. 

[ -69 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

Taking an active part in the romps and 
play of children is a resource that, if open 
to him, he should embrace. Probably he 
has so schooled himself to inexpressiveness 
that he cannot at once emerge out of the 
secondary place into which he is relegated 
at social gatherings ; but three or four 
times a year he should, at whatever cost 
of courage, insist upon being heard. The 
advice to make a noise need not be taken 
literally, — though such interpretation 
would lead few quiet men into serious 
error. It may serve the purpose if the man 
develops a strong outdoor enthusiasm, or 
a keen spirit of rivalry in games, for either 
of these will introduce into his existence 
that element of life that he most needs. 
If he can acquire some undignified accom- 
plishment, — if he can learn to sing a 
"coon song," or to play upon the mouth 
organ, or to dance a clog, or to recite 
" Casey at the Bat,'' — he will have made 
an advance in the art of living such as 
none but a constitutionally shy and quiet 

[ 170 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

person can understand. Perhaps, with the 
best will in the world, he can attain to 
none of these things ; he may then find a 
means of grace in the occasional revels 
and merry-makings that are not denied 
even the most quiet. Failing all else, 
and being quite out of conceit with him- 
self, let him go tramping in search of 
adventure, — in the city by-streets at 
night, or through the countryside. But 
there, again, does the quiet man become 
aware of his misfortune ; adventure evades 
him ; and while his assertive, unappre- 
ciative brother, on going downtown in 
the morning, may have a romantic en- 
counter with a runaway automobile occu- 
pied by a beautiful lady, or with a tiger 
strayed from a circus, he may roam the 
world and meet with no runaway automo- 
bile, no tiger, and, alas and alack ! no 
beautiful lady. Even so, let him persevere ; 
preparing himself for adventure, he may 
almost attain the habit of mind of the ad- 
venturous. 

[ '7' ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

But never, I fear, will he fully attain it. 
There will always be the horrid, harassing 
doubt — never shared by the truly adven- 
turous — as to whether he would, indeed, 
bear himself heroically. To illustrate the 
point, I must make a confession; I am a 
quiet man. Although I have often pre- 
pared myself in mind, I have not yet set 
out upon my quest of adventure. But no 
longer ago than yesterday, one of my di- 
rect, unquestioning friends plunged into 
it ; and ever since I have been miserably 
torn with inquiry as to whether in his 
place I should have been so prompt. Rid- 
ing on his bicycle along a village street, 
he was aware that a wagon overtook and 
passed him at unusual speed, but he thought 
nothing of this. He had dismounted, and 
was entering a gateway when he heard a 
great hubbub behind him ; and looking 
round he saw men running, with cries of 
*' Stop him ! Stop him ! " and in front of 
them a man speeding along on a bicycle. 
My friend stepped out into the street and 

[ n^ ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

opposed a threatening front ; still the flee- 
ing rider came on. And then, just as he 
was about to whiz by, my friend hurled 
his bicycle into the rider's path ; the two 
machines went down with a crash, and 
the hero flung himself valiantly upon the 
groaning wretch, who lay crumpled amid 
the wreckage. *' I 've got him ! " cried the 
hero to the breathless, gathering throng. 
" Got him ! " they answered, with here 
and there a sneering accent of profanity. 
'* We yelled at you to stop the fellow in 
the wagon.'' " Yes, the fellow I was chas- 
ing," added the unfortunate captive. And 
indeed, it appeared that the driver was 
the miscreant, having knocked down a 
woman and made off; and the bicyclist 
had merely been one of a humane and 
inquisitive mob. 

Now, my agitating question has been, 
Should I, too, thus boldly, peremptorily, 
and efficiently have hurled my bicycle.? 
For the life of me I cannot tell. So many 
reasons why I might have done so occur 

[ 173 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

to me, and then again so many considera- 
tions which might have stayed my hand. 
A fleeing criminal — one's pubHc duty — 
and yet on such uncertain grounds — to 
wreck him so utterly, to damage him per- 
haps so irreparably ! All I am sure of is 
that I should have opposed a threatening 
front. 

And this, I imagine, is the chief afflic- 
tion, the shame of many a quiet man, — 
the dread of finding in some important 
moment that the reflective habit has pro- 
duced paralysis. Even if he breaks through 
the net of qualifying considerations and 
acts efficiently, he has the humiliated feel- 
ing that he has made a great mental to-do 
over a matter that some one else would 
have gone about without debate. More- 
over, he shrinks from using his faculties 
in unconventional ways ; again I must 
serve as corpus vile for purposes of illustra- 
tion. A man who had been my guest 
overnight decided the next morning, 
which happened to be Sunday, that he 

[ ^74 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

desired a cab. From the back window of 
my lodgings, which are on the fourth 
floor of the house, he descried a Hvery 
stable, and opening the window he 
shouted lustily in the Sabbath stillness the 
name of the proprietor. Now, although 
we have in our rear a livery stable, our 
neighborhood is prim and even fastidious ; 
the houses in our block are occupied by 
families with highly conventional notions 
of propriety. In some dismay I pulled 
my guest's coat-tails, whispering that I 
would send out for a cab ; withdrawing his 
head for a moment, he replied, ** This 
is quicker,'* and then again thrusting it 
forth, continued to bawl. At last a stable 
boy answered him ; he gave his order, 
specifying the number of the house with 
painful distinctness ; after which he turned 
to me and complimented me on the con- 
venience of my situation and the need- 
lessness of a jingling telephone. In my 
scheme of life, a cab is the last of all ex- 
travagances ; yet even if it were not, or 

[ '75 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

if I had found myself in the direst need 
of one, I am sure it would never have 
occurred to me to employ this simple, 
primitive method of securing it. Quiet- 
ness tends to unfit one for the use of rudi- 
mentary instruments. 

It is time, after these frank confessions, 
to rehearse some merits of the quiet man, 
and particularly to dwell upon the ad- 
mirable qualities of some quiet men. It is 
hardly necessary to summon up here the 
kindly and perhaps not more than three- 
quarters fallacious banality about the con- 
stant need of good listeners. We must 
persuade ourselves of some less negative 
excuse for our existence. I dismiss from 
consideration also the splendid quiet hero 
of romance, the Imperturbable ; when- 
ever I have discovered an air of the im- 
perturbable in a man, I have also discovered 
an offensive self-complacency, and I am 
unable to do justice to this particular flower 
of the species. 

Perhaps the most worthy office that the 

[ 176] 



THE QUIET MAN 

quiet man performs is that of the com- 
forter, or at least the sympathetic confidant 
of grief. He who is stricken in spirit, and 
must utter his sorrow, turns less readily to 
the exuberant than to the silent friend, 
whose speech is apter with eyes than with 
lips. It matters not very much if such a 
man has the weakness that must so often 
be imputed ; let him be but a true friend 
and a quiet one, and the sore in heart will 
take some comfort in him. If he has not 
the weaknesses, but is stanch and strong, a 
walk with him in the open air, whether 
in the biting winds of March or over the 
sunlit fields of May, or a talk with him 
before the winter fire, may put vigor, as 
well as the first sense of peace, into the 
soul. 

As such a friend is a resource in time 
of sadness, so en happier occasions he 
need never be a kill-joy. No merriment 
was ever stifled because one of those bid- 
den to share it could contribute nothing 
but appreciation. That quality the quiet 

[ ^11 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

man must have. It is the noisy or the 
active one who, even while giving life 
to happy gatherings, is most dangerous. 
Some blurted truth, some reckless jest, 
some too searching inquiry or too down- 
right, blunt debate may strike dead the gay 
laughter and transform cheerful, open- 
hearted contentment into a suffering de- 
sire to escape. Quiet men may rarely be 
charged with breaches of tact, careless and 
inconsiderate speech, the little slights that 
gall the sensitive, the little failures to be 
diplomatic where diplomacy were honest 
as well as kind. Quiet men are not the 
busybodies ; quiet men were not, I am 
convinced, the comforters of Job. 

And the best of them are deserving of 
nearly the best that we can say. Not quite 
the best; one can hardly believe that the 
great Elizabethans, for instance, were quiet 
men. But out of our own acquaintance 
let us pick the few who, without an im- 
pressive show of energy and activity, per- 
form in the most truly workmanlike way 

[ '78 ] 



THE QUIET MAN 

work that they seem willing to let pass 
unnoticed. They do not spend a great 
portion of their lives in efforts to attract 
attention to their achievements, to their 
skill ; they do not despise popular appre- 
ciation, but they find the courting of it un- 
important and unworthy; therefore they 
move upon the performance of their tasks, 
unfretful if they are neglected, keeping to 
themselves the trials and perplexities that 
they encounter, patiently overcoming and 
accomplishing. They may not win so 
many or so varied experiences and gifts 
from life as the reckless and ranging adven- 
turer ; theirs is not often the genius that 
builds the greatest and most enduring mon- 
uments ; yet nearly all that has the charm 
of fine and perfect workmanship, nearly all 
that is subtly and beautifully conceived and 
exquisitely wrought, in manufactures, in 
machinery, in painting and music and 
literature, bears testimony to the serene 
vision, the unremitting toil of the quiet 
man. 



VII 
«IN SWIMMING" 



^^N SWIMMING" 

Late in the afternoon, when the boys 
grew tired of playing baseball, some one 
would say, '* How about going in now ? " 
or, more often, give a whistle and hold 
up two fingers of one hand, the universal 
sign of natatory purpose and invitation. 
Then my heart would sink. At that age 
I never got tired of playing baseball — and 
I could not swim. Once they were headed 
for the river, it was useless to protest ; and 
I followed them, as disconsolate and en- 
vious a nine-year-old as there was in the 
land. 

We crossed the railroad track at the 
foot of the meadow, and ran down the 
path under the arching willows and oaks 
of the bank to the river beach. There, 
while the others were undressing, I would 
stand and scale stones out over the water 
with an assumed indifference, deaf to their 

[ 183 ] 



*'IN SWIMMING" 

urgings that I should come in with them 
and try to learn. They treated me with 
a compassionate kindUness, — not unlike 
that with which the heath-dwellers in 
"The Return of the Native" assisted the 
unfortunate Christian Cantle to acquiesce 
in his incompetence, — and when they 
found that I could not be persuaded, they 
would ask me, one after another, to keep an 
eye on their clothes. I do not know from 
what source they feared molestation, and 
I never was aware that any of them carried 
valuable property which might tempt a 
passer-by to crime. Their injunction may 
have been thoughtfully designed to restore 
to me some measure of self-respect and 
make me feel that, even though I could 
not swim, there was still a place for me 
in the world. At any rate, I took the 
responsibility with some seriousness, and 
preserved a sharp watch over all the ar- 
ticles intrusted to my care, occasionally 
nailing down a fluttering shirt with a 
stone, or pursuing a hat that had been 

[ '84] 



-IN SWIMMING" 

started on a bumping expedition by the 
breeze. 

When the half-past-five train burst thun- 
dering out of the cut a hundred yards up 
the river, all the boys made for deep water, 
or, if they were too near shore for that, 
modestly immersed themselves, — all ex- 
cept one young Indian, whose practice it 
was to come scrambling ashore and there 
dance defiantly, waving his arms and yell- 
ing while the train passed. This perform- 
ance was always rather shocking to me; 
even while I admired its daring. One day 
the Indian's mother was on the train, and 
recognized him from the window, and 
for a week thereafter he did not go in 
swimming, but sat w^ith me, like Fido, 
by the clothes. 

As often as I had the opportunity, 
and could be sure there were no other 
boys to spy upon my infantile efforts, I 
used to sneak down to the river and give 
myself swimming lessons. Whether the 
fault was mainly with the teacher or w4th 

[ ^85] 



"IN SWIMMING" 

the pupil, I do not know; but I had begun 
to despair of ever learning, when one day 
I stretched myself out recklessly upon the 
water and began to swim. I was so amazed 
to find myself afloat that after a few strokes 
I felt I had better stop and think about 
it, so I dropped my feet and groped for 
bottom ; to my infinite horror it was not 
there. The current of the river, probably 
more than my own efforts, had carried me 
beyond my depth. 

I beat the water desperately with my 
hands, trying to regain the swimming po- 
sition, and went under. My fright, after 
the first terror at not finding bottom, was 
quite inadequate. When I came up stran- 
gling and saw the shore slipping by, the 
rock on which I had laid my clothes 
more distant than before, I thrust crazily 
with arms and legs and determined that 
nobody, and least of all my mother, should 
ever know of my narrow escape. I ac- 
cepted escape as a foregone conclusion, 
even while realizing the peril. Somehow 

[ '86] 



-IN SWIMMING'' 

I got ashore, choking and gasping, and 
made my way back to my clothes. There, 
while I sat on a rock and recovered my- 
self, I reflected with some pride that I had 
achieved a new importance. I had almost 
been drowned, and I had learned to swim. 
A disposition to test the reality of my ac- 
quirement, and ascertain if I might rely 
on its permanence, impelled me to enter 
the water again. In the exhilaration of 
confirming my discovery, it soon became 
a pleasure to take a risk. I enjoyed the 
sensation when, a few days later, I inter- 
rupted the ball game by giving a whistle 
and holding up two fingers of one hand. 

The largest percentage of drowning ac- 
cidents to boys occur, I am told, in rivers. 
From my own experience I am con- 
vinced that if a lake or the ocean is acces- 
sible, a river should not be chosen as the 
scene of one's elementary swimming les- 
sons ; but where a river is the only water 
at hand, a boy had better risk being swept 
away by the current. No doubt in most 

[ '87] 



"IN SWIMMING" 

cases he will take that risk, even though 
his parents concede only as much liberty 
to swim as the mother in the nonsense 
rhyme was willing to allow her daughter. 
One of the pleasures that I find in sum- 
mer travel is to watch out of the train 
window, as we skirt the banks of streams, 
for the boys bathing, standing waist-deep 
in the water, or, with only wet heads 
above the surface, stemming the current 
in momentary rivalry. In these glimpses 
the pleasure is perhaps not wholly that 
of personal reminiscence and sympathy ; I 
think the veriest hoodlum of the village, 
seen stripped and in a woodland setting, 
may be the Pan in one's fleeting vision of 
Arcady. Some persons I have heard cry 
out against the publicity of such bathing ; 
to me the sight seems as innocent as the 
pastime. Cows knee-deep in streams are 
the painter's favorite subject for a pastoral ; 
if I were a painter, I think I should 
choose almost as often boys bathing in a 
brook. 

[ i88 ] 



*MN SWIMMING" 

To be picturesque is not, however, the 
swimmer's aim, and except for its pictur- 
esque effect river bathing is not very sat- 
isfactory. The bigger the river, the more 
dirty and unpleasant and unsheltered is it 
likely to be; the smaller the stream, the 
more certain in the summer months to be- 
come a mere dribble in which one crawls 
about hunting for a spot where it may be 
deep enough to swim. Or if it is not 
disqualified in either of these respects, its 
current will cause annoyance ; one grows 
weary of always having to quarter against 
it, of never being able to lie peacefully at 
rest without being whisked off to a point 
which is inconveniently conspicuous or 
from which return is undesirably laborious. 

The utmost luxury for the swimmer 
would be always to have freedom of choice 
as to where he would swim — whether 
in pond or lake or ocean. Then he would 
be able each day to adapt his swim to his 
mood. For swimming may be variously 
operative on a man ; desiring one remedy, 

[ i«9 ] 



"IN SWIMMING" 

he may find himself refused it by the 
perversity of the element — served with 
the wrong prescription. He would like a 
swim as relaxing as a Turkish bath, and 
he is in for a boxing match. For instance, 
it is a hot, oppressive day ; you have been 
doing concentrated mental labor for some 
hours, and you wish to turn, not to vigor- 
ous exercise, but to a soothing employ- 
ment, a languid, indolent use of the mus- 
cles which will leave you in a mood for 
sleep. But your available swimming tank 
is the Atlantic Ocean, in a latitude where 
the temperature of the water never rises 
above fifty-eight degrees ; and the day is 
windy and overcast ; you put on your bath- 
ing suit and stand on the beach looking 
reluctantly at the breaking waves. The 
wind chills you a little, and although 
nothing is more distasteful than to nerve 
yourself for an effort, you doit; you take 
a breath and run into the icy water — and 
oh, the torture of that entrance ! The cold 
waves dash at your ankles and then at your 

[ 190 ] 



-IN SWIMMING" 

knees, and then, while you are reeling, 
they grip your waist and wrestle with you 
for a fall — which you grant them with 
a shuddering relief. You go under, lips 
compressed, eyes shut, and shoot up again 
to the air, crying to yourself, ** Thank 
Heaven, that 's over! " Then you kick out 
and strike out and writhe round in the 
waves in a furious effort to get warm ; 
you can't do it swimming on your breast, 
and you turn on one side and draw up 
your knees and lunge out and gasp ; and 
then a wave cuffs you in the head and 
gives you a stinging earful, and you leap 
up in angry, sputtering remonstrance. You 
do not grow appreciably warmer, violent 
as is your endeavor, rough as is your buf- 
feting; you are bounded up and down, and 
pitched into the smother of breaking 
waves, and slapped and doused and inso- 
lently abused, until you work yourself into 
a passion and plow through the turbu- 
lent sea with venomous puffs that might 
be translated, " You will, will you ! You 

[ 191 ] 



''IN SWIMMING" 

will, will you ! Take that now — take that 
— take that!" Thus you are provoked to 
an insane contention and excitement, when 
a few moments before your whole incli- 
nation had been toward a meditative float- 
ing upon a warm and tranquil pond. But 
for all your furious bravado, for all your 
mighty exercise, your teeth are already 
chattering with cold, your vigor is stiff- 
ening in your veins ; and you are glad to 
turn and be helped ashore by the waves 
that you had presumed to defy. 

Then, when you rub yourself down and 
dress, you begin to glow with an ardent 
energy, with legs a little tremulous, per- 
haps. You had desired mere relaxation, 
and you have been violently stimulated. 
But the spirit to be up and doing soon 
fades into an impotent restlessness, and 
from that you pass into the comatose in- 
dolence which was your primary desire. 
There is, perhaps, some subtle detriment 
to the temper when one has to experience 
such probationary stress and tumult in 

[ 192 ] 



"IN SWIMMINC 

order to attain the repose into which the 
dweller by a pond may gently slip. Tho- 
reau would have been a more irascible 
person if he had had to do his swimming 
off the Maine coast instead of in Lake 
Walden. 

Yet the placid dwellers beside quiet 
lakes may not claim entire advantage of 
opportunity over the turbulent sea bathers. 
They know the soft delight of swimming ; 
they miss its stormy joy. It is agreeable 
to be one of them when the only demand 
made by your body is for rest; but when 
both your spirits and your vitality are high, 
the unruffled smoothness of the pond, even 
though it is overhung by the springiest of 
springboards, does not quite meet your 
longings. You can run and leap and dive 
and rush in sprints through the water, but 
you are aware of a disappointing tameness; 
you are playing in a dead, unresponsive 
medium ; you are not sporting with a re- 
sourceful, lithe, and sinewy adversary; you 
cannot conjure up the excitement and ar- 

[ 193 ] 



**IN SWIMMING" 

dor of battle which grip your imagination 
with the first plunge into the swelling 
ocean. The greater buoyancy of the salt 
water exalts the swimmer's spirit and 
quickens his vitality ; the gentler drag of 
the inland lake wooes him to a luxurious 
listlessness. As you buffet the ocean waves, 
you can exultingly feel and exclaim, "Aha, 
old man, you 're trying to down me — but 
I'm still on top; put that in your pipe 
and smoke it." And so, proud wrestler 
that you are, you swarm up one billow 
and down the next, grappling to your 
heart all the while a personified adversary, 
and laughing with triumph because in 
spite of his struggles he cannot get you 
down and put his knee on your chest. It 
is something to emerge panting and drip- 
ping from these contests, and strut upon 
the sand, and mentally credit yourself with 
one more victory. 

Quiet inland bathing offers you no such 
extravagant opportunities to be a poseur. 
If the water is warm, you loll in it at your 

[ 194 ] 



-IN SWIMMING" 

ease ; your mind is soon stupefied by the 
sensuousness in which you are enfolded ; 
the interest of your sleepy eyes does not ex- 
tend beyond the gentle ripples that widen 
away from the slow, submerged strokes 
of your arms. After a while you roll over 
on your back and drowsily execute at in- 
tervals a languid "shoo fly" leg motion, 
while you look drowsily up into the void. 
Now and then you will raise your arms 
and flap them down through the water 
like a pair of sweeps; it is only a tired sort 
of effort. And finally, in the supreme 
abandonment of indolence, you lay your 
head back, far back, until the water creeps 
up about your eyelids; you stretch out 
legs and arms motionless, and lie, breath- 
ing tranquilly, sensible of no other move- 
ment in the world than the slight flux and 
slip of the water upon your heaving chest. 
Then may you realize, perhaps, something 
of the lark's sensation when, with wings 
outspread, it hangs suspended between 
earth and sky. He who has never thus 

[ 195 ] 



-IN SWIMMING'' 

suspended himself idly in still water, with 
fathoms below him and infinity above, 
has missed one of the sensuous delights of 
existence. Unfortunate man, who goes to 
his grave believing that there is nothing 
better than bed for weary limbs and a 
jaded brain! 

The consequences, of course, are hun- 
ger and torpidity. The bath in the quiet 
pond does not make you feel " freshened 
up" — unless you flout its allurements, 
dive in, scramble out, and roughly rub 
yourself down. I cannot be sympathetic 
with any one whose moral rigidity thus 
denies him a Sybaritic indulgence. In the 
cold, loud-sounding sea I may be his com- 
rade; but let him not insult with such 
hygienic tentativeness my luxurious inland 
pool. He must give himself to it trust- 
ingly, with no reserve, willing to be wooed 
into idle dalliance, to eat the lotus and 
smell the poppies and mandragora of life. 
If he dares no experience that may slacken 
the tension of his fibres, physical or moral, 

[ ^96] 



^'IN SWIMMING" 

let him avoid the seductive inland pool. 
For not only does a surrender to its em- 
brace leave one too indolent to work; it 
even purifies the zealot who sets too high 
a value upon work, and it insinuates be- 
fore him an ideal of play. After the first 
somnolence has worn off, he will be ac- 
tive for further exercise, for sports and 
games; he will show a keen interest in 
being amused ; but for toil he will have 
aversion. Fresh water swimming is for 
those who have never had, or who have 
put aside, scruples against idleness ; for the 
promotion of the "strenuous life" we must 
have the water cold, and we must have it 
salt. 

It depends partly upon the individual, 
and again partly upon the place, whether 
swimming is more to be enjoyed as a soli- 
tary recreation or as a social diversion. 
There are some unimaginative persons, 
incapacitated for solitude under any cir- 
cumstances, who would never resort to a 
lonely swim except in the last despair of 

[ 197 ] 



"IN SWIMMING" 

ennui ; and I believe there are a few mor- 
bid persons who shrink from displaying 
themselves in bathing suits and abhor the 
more informal freedom that sometimes 
prevails among swimmers. But disregard- 
ing such abnormal types, we may broadly 
lay down the principle that a lonely swim 
in the ocean is a cheerless undertaking, 
and that a lonely swim in a small inland 
lake is a delight. In excluding the ocean 
as a fit resource for the solitary, I would 
not deny that he may find satisfaction in 
an early morning plunge; but that is hardly 
" going in swimming."' There are, to be 
sure, a few moments in the life of a man 
when in his own exultant bigness he may 
stalk grandly and alone into the sea and 
hail it as his intimate playfellow, and breast 
it with a single valiancy — when he may 
imagine himself in the likeness of deep 
calling unto deep, just as, if he happened 
at that juncture to be mountain climbing, 
he would leap from crag to crag and per- 
sonify the live thunder. But these occa- 

[198]. 



*'IN SWIMMING" 

sions arise rarely in the lives of ordinary 
mortals ; and they are to be sei-zed at the 
instant ; their duration is seldom above 
half an hour. If the lawyer could strip off 
his clothes and plunge into the lonely 
ocean the moment after he had completed 
the masterly argument that was to disrupt 
a trust; if the doctor who had struggled 
day and night sleeplessly to bring back the 
moribund to life, and had come at last 
staggering to victory, could in that weary 
happiness of power launch himself uncom- 
panioned on the waves; if the speculator 
who, to general panic and his own large 
aggrandizement, had turned the market 
topsy-turvy could souse himself, chuck- 
ling like a boy at his prank, and find the 
ocean comrade for his laughter, — that 
would indeed be the sublimation of climax. 
But as our Napoleonic moments are few, 
so also are our Napoleonic moods transitory ; 
after a brief half hour there come the 
questions: ** Is it so complete?" ''What 
next?" " Has destiny nothing more?" At 

[ '99] 



'^IN SWIMMING'* 

the psychological moment the ocean was 
remote or unavailable for solitude ; by the 
time we can get down to it and the beach 
is all cleared for our majestic entrance, 
we begin to look about for the encourage- 
ment of companions. We do not like to 
feel insignificant; and nothing makes a 
man more sensible of insignificance than 
striking all alone out into the bound- 
less sea. If there is but one unknown 
head bobbing in the waves a quarter of a 
mile distant, it will give him heart for his 
mimic wrestling; but if there is no one to 
share the absurdity of the play with him 
and dare with him the oppressive grim- 
ness of infinity, he soon comes ashore 
subdued. 

Indeed, even in its most benign moods, 
the ocean has for the lonely bather a du- 
bious geniality ; it does not encourage tri- 
fling. It is only when the exuberant and 
boisterous crowds are gathered on the sand 
and frolic in the waves that there is created 
an atmosphere of light-hearted forgetful- 

[ 200 ] 



-IN SWIMMING" 

ness which makes the swimmer's sanguine 
imagination quite free to play. 

And these exuberant crowds — how 
they contribute to the interest and gayety 
of your swim ! As you go lunging through 
the water, rudely shouldering your huge 
adversary, you view the other swimmers 
and the promenaders on the beach with 
a heartening enjoyment. The man just 
entering the water, flinging up his arms 
as he treads warily, the woman out on the 
raft who is learning to dive and who flops 
flat under the surface with a splash, the 
swift swimmer who glides by with a long 
overhead reach of a brown arm that rises 
and dips and rises again, rhythmical as 
a gull's wing, — such little glimpses give a 
zest to the elemental experience through 
which you are passing. You find it pleasant 
to loiter for a time in the midst of such 
buoyant and vivacious effort ; you like the 
shrill voices and the strident laughter ; your 
eyes sweep the beach with a moment's in- 
terest in the gay parasols, in the bunchy 

[ 201 ] 



"IN SWIMMING" 

bathing suits of the hesitating women, in 
the gaunt, dripping forms of the emerg- 
ing men. Then some human porpoise rolls 
lazily by on his back, with white toes and 
a comfortable amplitude projecting above 
the surface, and you feel that you have 
loitered long enough ; you must not be 
outstripped by such lumbering freight. So 
you turn and go about your business, — 
the conquest of the vast wrestler who has 
been nudging you all the while. Far out 
beyond the diving raft, and beyond the 
other bathers, you meet him and try con- 
clusions; you test upon him all your art 
and skill ; you turn on your side and shoot 
yourself at him like a projectile ; you grap- 
ple with him hand over hand; you tread 
him down with your feet ; you duck un- 
der and trip the wave that he sends to quell 
you; and then you swim under water and 
come up suddenly and take him in the rear. 
There is never a moment when you are 
not getting the better of him in spite of 
all his roughness ; and though at the end 

[ 202 ] 



-IN SWIMMING" 

you have to call it a drawn battle, you 
know that morally the victory is yours. 
And on your way in from that gallantly 
fought field to rejoin those more timorous 
bathers whose champion you may swell- 
ingly imagine yourself, you stop at the 
raft and take a final dive, just by way of 
a farewell fillip to your gnashing adver- 
sary. 

Occasionally on a hot summer afternoon 
I resort to a city beach which is inclosed 
for men alone. It is the most democratic 
place I know, and one of the most hu- 
morous. Clergymen, doctors, lawyers, 
shopkeepers, plumbers, motormen, team- 
sters, and, I dare say, criminals, enter the 
bath-house, put off their clothes, and pass 
out upon the other side, equal not only 
before the Lord, but also in one another's 
sight. Each man wears suspended by a 
cord about his neck a small brass check 
bearing the number of his dressing-room ; 
— and he wears nothing else. 

From either end of the bath-house a 

[ 203 ] 



"IN SWIMMING'' 

high board fence juts far out into the 
water, and shelters the bathers from ex- 
posure to the fastidious world. It is a 
scene for Teufelsdrockh — so many *' forked 
radishes with heads fantastically carved'' 
performing on land and water so many 
exercises — '' while I/' exclaims the Phi- 
losopher of Clothes, ** — good Heaven ! — 
have thatched myself over with the dead 
fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the 
entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or 
seals, the felt of furred beasts ; and walk 
abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped 
with shreds and tatters raked from the 
Charnel-house of Nature, where they 
would have rotted, to rot on me more 
slowly ! " And it must have been after being 
made partaker in some similar scene that 
he declared in enthusiasm, " There is 
something great in the moment when a 
man first strips himself of adventitious 
wrappages ; and sees indeed that he is 
naked, and, as Swift has it, ' a forked strad- 
dling animal with bandy legs ; ' yet also a 

[ 204 ] 



"IN SWIMMING" 

Spirit and unutterable Mystery of Mys- 
teries.'* 

According to the hour, the warmth of 
the day, the height of the tide, the bathers 
vary in number from fifty to five hundred. 
They are of all ages and of all figures ; 
among them some, by the baked brown- 
ness of their skins, may be distinguished 
as habitues of this beach ; they lie on the 
sand, sunning themselves by the hour, 
tanning themselves all over with a scru- 
pulous uniformity. At one end of the 
beach three or four play handball against 
the fence; others are jumping and run- 
ning; there are usually one or two at- 
tempting complicated acrobatic feats. One 
dignified old gentleman I once saw stand 
unperturbed for some minutes in the mid- 
dle of the beach, gravely performing with 
his empty fists a variety of Indian club 
and dumb-bell evolutions ; and near by a 
stout person with bushy white side-whis- 
kers was making repeated efibrts to touch 
his toes. It speaks well, I think, for the 

[ 205 ] 



«IN SWIMMING^' 

manners of our men that the most whim- 
sical of these performances evoked nothing 
more than passing glances and consider- 
ately hidden smiles. I know of no other 
place where in the interest of health a 
man may so companionably play the fool. 
And after he has done that to his heart's 
content, and sunned himself sufficiently 
on the sand, the luxury of his swim out 
into the bay where a fleet of sailboats is at 
anchor, and distant green islands with 
gray buildings lift their heads, would be 
considerably less if he were clogged by a 
bathing suit. The " return to nature " 
which has been so much agitated of late, 
and which is recommended chiefly — to 
judge by publishers' prospectuses — for its 
renewal of " red blood " in the system, re- 
quires from most of its devotees a sacrifice 
of time and comfort and a forsaking of 
civilized life. An afternoon at this quaint 
beach, where human nature stripped to 
the skin is primitively beguiling itself in 
sun and air and sea, satisfies my own pre- 

[ 206 ] 



"IN SWIMMING" 

adamite cravings and spares me the incon- 
veniences usually suffered by those who 
respond to the call of the wild. 

It has been a grief to me that the most 
enthusiastic swimmer whom I know has 
always contemned this favorite resort, — 
a prejudice which I set down partly to the 
fact that he is British and an unbudgeable 
creature of habit. He fortifies himself, 
however, with argument. " When you 
swim in the ocean," he says, ** let it be in 
the ocean, and not in a miserable inclosed 
bay fringed by a city." So every summer 
afternoon, rain or shine, he takes a boat 
down the harbor, and after an hour's sail 
lands at a well-known beach that has the 
desirable outlook upon unlimited sea. I 
accompanied him on one of these excur- 
sions ; his fingers were fumbling at his 
buttons before he left the boat. " I '11 be 
waiting for you on the beach," he said, as 
he shut me into my compartment at the 
bath-house ; and though I was expeditious 
in the hope of denying him that satisfac- 

[ 207 ] 



-IN SWIMMING" 

tion, I found him not only waiting as he 
had predicted, but waiting with an air 
of intolerable impatience. There was no 
trembling on the brink for me that day. 
Into the water I went perforce, with a 
rush and a splash, close at his heels ; it was 
cold, and I pressed out at a rapid stroke. 
He held his lead ; after we had gone some 
distance and my teeth were chattering, I 
suggested that it was perhaps time to turn 
back. -Turnback! I haven't started yet," 
he replied scornfully. As he is not young, 
but an experienced scientist and philoso- 
pher with a full gray beard, and I have 
considerably the advantage of him in years, 
I was nettled by his answer, and resolved 
to stay with him in his folly; no doubt 
he would soon be calling on me to save 
his life. But at last in those arctic cur- 
rents I surrendered my pride ; - 1 'm 
going back," I announced. - All right," 
he answered, and continued on into the 
Atlantic. 

Half an hour later, when I was all 

[ 208 ] 



-IN SWIMMING" 

dressed and waiting, he waded ashore and 
walked up the sand, the brine dripping 
from his gray beard, his arms pink and 
gHstening, — not a quiver of his frame. 
" You do pretty well for a city swimmer," 
he said kindly. 

Even with that concession from him I 
am aware that he should be writing this 
paper, and not I. My only justification is 
my feeling that the inexpert dabbler in an 
art may sometimes bring to the interpret- 
ing of it a keener zest of longing and a 
more ardent estimate than the past master 
who has penetrated all its mysteries. 

It seems somewhat remarkable that 
swimming should have had such scant ap- 
preciation in literature. The poets have 
astonishingly neglected it — astonishingly, 
I say, for it supplies one of the most sen- 
suous human experiences. Byron, to 
whom, of all writers, one would naturally 
look for a sympathetic treatment of the 
theme, gives it only a few mediocre verses. 
Clough has dealt with it mock-seriously ; 

[ 209 ] 



"IN SWIMMING" 

Swinburne has experimented with it, — 
and achieved one memorable line, — 

"The dreaming head and the steering hand." 

For Shakespeare there was an opportunity, 

— in "Julius Cassar," — but he ignored 
it. Homer might have been eloquent, 
but with his hero Ulysses three days in 
the water and half dead, he could not 
enlarge on swimming as a pleasure. Shel- 
ley and Keats, poets of sensuousness, make 
no poem about swimming. Walt Whit- 
man, though both rhapsodist and swim- 
mer, was never inspired to rhapsodize 
on swimming. The most appreciative 
and suggestive words on the subject have 
been written by Meredith in " Lord Or- 
mont and his Aminta,'' in the chapter 
entitled "A Marine Duet." "The swim 
was a holiday ; all was new — nothing 
came to her as the same old thing since 
she took her plunge; she had a sea-mind 

— had left her earth-mind ashore. The 
swim . . . passed up out of happiness, 

■ [ 210 ] 



"IN SWIMMING" 

through the spheres of dehrium, into the 
region where our life is as we would have 
it be : a home holding the quiet of the 
heavens, if but midway thither, and a 
home of delicious animation of the whole 
frame, equal to wings." Matey was pur- 
suing her. " He had doubled the salt sea's 
rapture, — and he had shackled its gift 
of freedom. She turned to float, gather- 
ing her knees for the funny sullen kick." 
There is a true descriptive phrase ! " Their 
heads were water-flowers that spoke at 
ease. . . . They swam silently, high, low, 
creatures of the smooth green roller. He 
heard the water-song of her swimming." 
But it will not do to extract sentences 
from their setting ; I will make only one 
more quotation. *' The pleasure she still 
knew" — returning to shore — " w^as a 
recollection of the outward swim, when 
she had been privileged to cast away sex 
with the push from earth, as few men 
will believe that women, beautiful women, 
ever wish to do." 

[ 211 ] 



"IN SWIMMING'' 

As to the truth of this, let some wo- 
man who is a swimmer testify ; if it is 
true, the full, adequate appreciation of 
swimming can never be written by a 
man. 



VIII 
BRAWN AND CHARACTER 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

When Robert Louis Stevenson was asked 
what lack in life caused him the keenest 
pain, he answered, " The feeling that I 'm 
not strong enough to resent an insult 
properly, — not strong enough to knock 
a man down/' 

With civilization at a point where the 
resort to elemental weapons is practically 
obsolete, it might seem that there was 
something antiquated and unreal, more 
imaginary than genuine, in this complaint 
of the frail-bodied Stevenson ; probably 
in all his life, as in the lives of most gen- 
tlemen nowadays, he was never confronted 
with the alternative of knocking a man 
down or accepting a wound to his pride. 
If the occasion ever arose and he had to 
charge to the feebleness of his body his 
failure to sustain his dignity, the recollec- 
tion might indeed tinge him with bitter- 

[ 215 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

ness ; but it is difficult to believe that the 
gentle and lovable Stevenson argued from 
an actual experience of humiliation. 

Yet it is not alone the painful memo- 
ries or the logical apprehensions of ill 
which awaken the most sensitive realiza- 
tion of defencelessness and fill the soul 
with the haunting dread of incompetence. 
From a clouded childhood such a dis- 
trust is usually derived, rather than from 
the isolated blunders or failures, however 
monumental, of later years. Stevenson, the 
petted and fragile child at home, went 
finally to school ; and it hardly needs a 
biographer to tell us how the high-spirited, 
imaginative boy, who liked to shine, met 
with repression from the stalwart, obsti- 
nate young Scots. In their rough sports 
he was never a leader ; that was morti- 
fication enough to one of his spirit; and 
it was not the full measure of his mor- 
tification. With his imperious outbursts, 
his flashing temper, his physical weakness, 
he afforded some of them rare sport. 

[216] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

His school-days were miserable to him, 
and miserable school-days are likely to 
affect permanently a man's outlook. Per- 
haps not any one bullying episode of which 
he may have been an impotent victim, not 
any one instance where he stood solitary 
to one side, while the school acclaimed 
their champion, remained to give a special 
vengefulness to that longing of his mature 
years, " If I were only strong enough to 
knock a man down! " But the feeling of 
inferiority lingered in him after he had 
passed the period when inferiority of that 
particular kind ceases to be reckoned im- 
portant ; in this one respect his standard 
remained that of the immature boy. 

Weaker than his fellows and high-spir- 
ited, he came to be reckless of such strength 
as he had; with bravado and imagination 
he recompensed himself for the niggard- 
liness of nature. The weak who are poor- 
spirited and without bravado do not dis- 
guise that they are timorous or furtive, 
subservient or cringing ; and weakness 

[ ^^7 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

does very often impose poverty of spirit. 
In its attenuation there may be a sharpen- 
ing of wits and hence a success in life — 
of a kind — achieved by craft or dupHcity 
or deviousness, and guarded by a suspi- 
cious vigilance ; the man of spirit scorns a 
success so vi^on and so preserved. If, like 
Stevenson, he was born a weakling, his 
path is indeed laborious and must be hewn 
out of the very rock of adversity. 

But the man of great bodily vigor, who 
in his boyhood was of conspicuous strength 
among his fellows,— how does he ever 
fail of leadership ^nd eminence in what- 
ever career he chooses ? The early self- 
confidence that he has developed must be 
tremendous, — the discovery that in all the 
affairs of boyhood which are truly ac- 
counted of moment he is without a peer, 
— able to overthrow any one in wrestling, 
to swim longer, to run faster, to bat a 
ball farther than any of his comrades, — 
this gradual unfolding of his powers must 
cause such a youth to tread the earth with 

[218] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

a conscious greatness. Why should he ever 
be afraid ? and what is it but fear that 
withholds any of us from large achieve- 
ment ? His imagination does not implant 
in him doubt and distrust, his mediocre 
rank at school and his dulness at his books 
cause him no misgivings, for at his time 
of life excellence in these matters is es- 
teemed parrotlike, and distinction in them 
is contemptuously awarded to the weak. 
It might be expected that the self-confi- 
dence acquired in early years through a 
mastery of all one's contemporaries could 
never quite forsake the most unlucky ; that 
a man with such a history would rise from 
each overthrow stronger, like Antaeus, for 
having touched the earth, — with courage 
undiminished and some gain in wisdom. 
Yet for every Antaeus there is perhaps also 
a Goliath. Whence to these unhappy 
giants come their Davids ? 

Only part of the truth may be furnished 
by the most obvious reply, — that a man 
whose principal regard has been to main- 

[2.9] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

tain physical supremacy over his fellows 
finds himself less well equipped for the 
struggle as it becomes less and less man- 
ual. Accustomed to a rudimentary enforce- 
ment of his boyish personality, he often has 
no great readiness in adapting himself to 
the subtler methods employed by the aging 
world. The weaker and more studious 
among his contemporaries are able now to 
match craft and knowledge against his 
ignorance, — and he can no longer retal- 
iate by a triumphant demonstration of his 
superior weight. 

Such an attempt to account for the 
clenching of the humble clerical pen in the 
fist, discouraged at forty, that had been re- 
doubtable at fifteen, for the languid dulness 
of the eye that once had overawed a little 
world, for the sluggish gait and the shabby 
dress of him who in days past had stepped 
alert with the champion's zest in life, will 
perhaps be rejected by the philosopher as 
inadequate — at least as comprehended in 
a larger cause. Nowadays lack of prepa- 

[ 220 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

ration does not sufficiently explain failure ; 
the most ill-equipped business man or pro- 
fessional man, if he has a genial assertive- 
ness and a willingness to represent shoddy 
wares and spurious talents as genuine, need 
not despair of attaining a meretricious 
success. Self-conlidence is older brother 
to an easy conscience and a tendency to 
** bluff; " and these imply a faciUty in 
amassing riches. Yet almost daily I pass on 
the street a giant of sixteen stone who 
can still put the shot and throw the ham- 
mer, who in figure and bearing seems de- 
signed for one of life's larger destinies, and 
who would gladly embrace success, how- 
ever ignoble, instead of posing for a pit- 
tance as an artist's model. 

Young men and boys of great bodily 
strength are usually more intent on exer- 
cising their power than on accomplishing 
a purpose. In the habit of mind and ac- 
tion so engendered lies the great impedi- 
ment which in after life may balk them 
of the fruits promised by their early vic- 

[ 221 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

torious self-confidence. The easy display 
of their prowess wins them such admiring 
regard that achievement seems superfluous 
and unprofitable; they attain to eminence 
by methods which do not tax their effort 
and which are as ephemeral as play. Mean- 
while, their more feebly constituted con- 
temporaries, seeking for distinction, have 
to occupy themselves with less spectacular 
action ; the office, the library, and the lab- 
oratory claim increasingly the interest of 
those who are ambitious ; and already pur- 
pose is shaping itself in their minds, — 
purpose of accomplishment and not mere 
purpose of competition ; books are germi- 
nating, steam engines and electric motors 
are being devised, law and medicine and 
architecture have begun to awaken some 
constructive thought. Yet building, how- 
ever hopefully, for the future, they envy 
in their cloistered preparation the wanton 
vigor of the strong. They are learning 
to husband and concentrate their energy 
while their large-framed friends are liv- 

[ 222 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

ing from day to day in a sort of opulent 
diffusion. 

The tendency of the strong is not so 
much to work definitely towards some 
purpose as to keep constantly testing their 
strength in whatever competition offers ; 
variety and excitement are what in their 
vitaHty they crave, and so long as they 
may be active they care little what monu- 
ment they leave behind them. For a few 
brilliant exploits there is much waste and 
much triviality; they cast about contin- 
ually to prevail over some new person or 
some new obstacle without regard for the 
intrinsic value of the struggle. Consist- 
ency and conviction are virtues on which 
they seldom make a stand ; erratic live- 
liness often speeds them with warring im- 
pulses along a primrose path. 

A classmate of mine at school excelled 
in strength nearly all his fellows. His 
strength indeed possessed him as it were 
a devil. He was as willing to exhibit it by 
hectoring the weak as by tussling with 

[ 223 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

those who could put up a defence. It is 
fallacious to assert that the bully is always 
a coward. This boy was in many respects 
an egregious bully, but he was without fear. 
I think that in his roughness with the 
smaller boys he was also without malice, 
without any particularly cruel satisfac- 
tion in causing them humiliation and pain. 
It was merely, I believe, that he had an ex- 
cess of animal energy which must always 
be expressing itself, and the added human 
desire for seeing some visible 1-esponse to 
its expression. 

There came into the school a ^* new 
boy," — timorous, girlish, and pious, — 
one who, with a devoted mother and sis- 
ters, had probably led a too sequestered 
life. Young Hercules cut his finger one 
day and swore ; and the new boy, who was 
close by, turned his back and crossed him- 
self. Unfortunately Hercules detected him 
in this ; thenceforth, whenever he saw the 
new boy he would emit the most unwar- 
rantable and shocking oaths, and call others 

[ 224 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

to witness the effect. Finally, this diversion 
became so entertaining to a number that 
boys who had never adopted profanity 
resorted to it for the sole purpose of an- 
noying their new friend ; and a favorite 
amusement was for half a dozen to sur- 
round him and then swear busily about 
the circle in order to see him turn and turn 
and make without concealment — as in- 
deed he was courageous enough to do — 
his devotional, deprecating sign. The per- 
secution of him did not, I am sorry to say, 
stop with this ; and there was some abuse 
of strength on the part of Hercules which, 
if it was not very brutal, must measurably 
have saddened the newcomer's life. 

But one night Hercules came up when 
another fellow — about as strong as him- 
self — was endeavoring to put the '* new 
kid'' into a snowdrift. And then the rest 
of us were startled. *' Stop that!" cried 
Hercules, and rushed to the rescue. '' You 
let that boy alone ! " He seized the jocular 
bully by the collar and swung him round ; 

[ 225 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

the intended victim wriggled free, and after 
a brief struggle the two strong boys fell 
into the snowdrift, with Hercules on top. 
The other was his friend, but there had 
been no playfulness in the assault. Neither, 
I suppose, had there been much chivalry. 
At least I cannot say that the new boy 
was thenceforth emancipated from the per- 
secution of Hercules or could depend upon 
his championship ; and I imagine it was 
simply the sudden raging need of exercis- 
ing his strength against some one that 
had driven him to intervene. 

Poor Hercules ! He was of the kin of 
Goliatli rather than of Antsus. He went 
about challenging the world in his restless 
energy of the moment ; always he was de- 
manding some fresh test for what was in 
him of the elemental man ; always he was 
rebellious, irresponsible, and roaming. He 
met his death in an act of futile gallantry. 
His excess of physical strength and the 
challenging spirit with which it imbued 
him were surely his undoing. 

[ 226 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

Sam Parks, the labor leader and felon, 
is not yet forgotten. He came to America 
at the ageof twenty, an illiterate Irishman, 
strong, domineering, and prone to use his 
fists. In the lumber camps of Canada 
and Minnesota he made a reputation as a 
** slugger." When he took up the trade 
of an ironworker, his methods of assert- 
ing himself continued as drastic as in the 
lumber camps. ** He cleaned out champion 
after champion,'' says a newspaper bio- 
graphy of him. '' He was a natural born 
tyrant. A man who would n't bend to his 
will got slugged." 

In New York there were eleven differ- 
ent unions of ironworkers. " Parks joined 
as many of them as he could and then 
proceeded to consolidate them all. . . . 
With all the unions merged into one, Parks 
became a dictator. He encountered rival 
after rival, but thrust all aside. His favor- 
ite weapons were his fists. He surrounded 
himself with a gang of indolent ironwork- 
ers, the thugs of the trade. Opponents of 

[ 227 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

Parks were simply slugged. Ironworkers 
who refused to strike at his order were 
waylaid and beaten. . . . He extorted 
money from employers, stopped work 
when and where he pleased, started it 
again as he liked, made men of wealth 
get down on their knees to him. . . . The 
idea that his power could be broken never 
occurred to Parks and his friends. Parks 
was warned, but, drunk with power, he 
ignored the warning. He knocked one ad- 
viser flat on his back for presuming to sug- 
gest that he go slow. He forced his way 
into the presence of employers, whether 
they wanted to see him or not, cursed 
them, laid down the law to them, and 
enforced his wishes." 

And then, in the height of his power, 
this bully and " grafter '' was haled away 
to prison. Brute strength and the over- 
weening confidence that flowed from it 
and the lust for power need not have 
wrecked his career, though they might 
have made it unenviable. The incessant 

[ 228 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

egotistical desire to prove himself always 
the better man, without the constraint of 
a moral issue or a worthy creative purpose, 
was that which overthrew Sam Parks, and 
it was a direct consequence of his strength. 
And there are many educated men who 
have the moral sense that he lacked, but 
who perhaps have no more definite object 
than he — no other aim than always to be 
powerful, as by reason of their strength in 
younger days they had been ; and these 
men may go astray, not so deplorably as 
he, yet to an end of futility because of 
their eagerness always to match themselves 
against others, and their belief that com- 
petition vindicates itself and implies pro- 
gress and productive achievement. 

The competitive instinct is the strongest 
of all the instincts of a healthy boy. He 
wishes to test himself in relation to the 
other boys of his acquaintance ; he must 
be forever pitting his strength and daring 
and endurance against theirs. This keen- 
ness to strive and to excel is the starting- 

[ 229 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

point for all useful masculine develop- 
ment; but it is a stage in development 
that must be outgrown. If it continues 
the ruling passion after manhood, it is to 
the man's detriment. For when the boy 
grows into the man, it is time that he 
should have erected in his mind his own 
standard, and that henceforth he should 
measure himself in comparison with that 
alone, and not with the stature of other 
men. One need never outgrow the sense 
of satisfaction in getting the better of a 
difficulty ; but the mere sighting of a dif- 
ficulty on the horizon inflames none but 
the unsettled and drifting with the desire 
for conquest. 

It is soaring into Utopian realms to 
assert that one should never have a sense 
of satisfaction in getting the better of an- 
other man ; but it is no absurdly lofty or 
unpractical notion that he who finds in 
such achievement a sufficient end and 
cause for labor may strive to no purpose, 
even though his days are full of contest 

[ 230 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

and victory. At the risk of seeming to 
hold a narrowly ascetic doctrine, I would 
assail that common phrase, '* the game 
of life." In its suggestion of emulation, 
light-hearted or grim according as one's 
game is tennis or football, it is misleading. 
All of us have our human adversaries who 
are to be thwarted ; their defeat, however, 
is an incident, not our chief concern. Our 
affair is the discharge of the duties where- 
with our involuntary entrance into life 
has burdened us, and the fulfilment of 
that purpose to which each of us in his 
imagination is kindled ; and so far as we 
are animated only by the competitive 
spirit of the game we miss the point of 
living. Our legitimate pleasure in over- 
coming need be none the less because it is 
subordinated to the pleasure of achieving 
or creating. Our fiery zeal for conquest 
need not be extinguished simply because 
it is held under a more grave constraint. 

The insatiate appetite for competition 
begets in a man a corroding egotism. In 

[ 231 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

the prideful desire to display one's self at 
the expense of others, to win the plaudits 
and the prize, one grows impatient of all 
but the showy hours. From the repeated 
excursions to match one's strength gal- 
lantly in contest, one returns with reluct- 
ance to the intervals of obscurity in which 
most of the genuine and permanently pro- 
ductive work is done. The further test- 
ing and demonstration of one's powers 
before an audience becomes a more im- 
perative desire ; the impulse to perform 
patient creative labor languishes. 

They who have come victorious through 
the competitions of youth will naturally 
be those most ardent to pursue life as a 
game, for in the conduct of a game they 
are accustomed to success. And in them 
egotism will most dangerously thrive. It 
will not be morbid and introspective, like 
that of the invalid ; it will not be so par- 
alyzing to the energies ; but it will lead 
to misdirected and scattered effort. It will 
be egotism of the sort that urges a man to 

[ 232 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

compete with others in excesses, to earn 
a reputation for his ability to outstay his 
comrades in a carousal, and be fit and 
ready for work at the usual hour. the next 
morning. He will become the egotist 
who squanders himself in unessential seek- 
ing and arrogant assertion, who seizes 
the office and ignores the duty, who is the 
bandit in business and the pillar in the 
church. 

It would not be fair to predicate of all 
such egotists an athletic and victorious 
boyhood, any more than to doom all ath- 
letes to so degenerate a fate. At the same 
time the descent of the hero is easy, — 
especially of the premature and precocious 
hero. Temptation besets him insidiously, 
for the egotism of the yguth who by rea- 
son of his physical powers lords it over 
his fellows is by no means an unattractive 
quality and subject to rebuke. It is very 
different from that into which it may lure 
him in later years. There are indeed few 
traits more charming than the unsophisti- 

[ 233 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

cated egotism of the athlete; and here 
there need be no reservations, — the pro- 
fessional athlete of mature years may be in- 
cluded as well as the callow amateur boy. 
By comparison, the egotism of the artist 
or the poet, which is commonly accepted 
as the most monstrous, is but a shrinking 
modesty. The poet or the artist is quite 
objective in valuing himself; it is indeed 
himself only as a creator that compels his 
admiration and reverence. But the sub- 
jection of the athlete to his own person is 
absolute ; he admires and reverences him- 
self as a creature ! The care with which 
he considers his diet, the attentiveness with 
which he grooms his body, the absorbed in- 
terest that he gives to all details of breath- 
ing and sleeping and exercising are, in 
comparison with his thoughtlessness about 
all that lies beyond, touching and ludicrous; 
the very simplicity of him in his engrossed 
self-study wins the smiling observer. And 
if he is a good-hearted boy or man, as 
one so healthy and so single-minded usu- 

[ 234 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

ally is, and is responsive to the admiration 
of others as well as of himself, he confers 
much happiness. No doubt innumerably 
more persons would choose to grasp the 
hand of John L. Sullivan than that of 
George Meredith; and the day of this op- 
portunity would be to them a memorable 
one and innocently bright with bliss. 

As an illustration of the pleasing and 
ample egotism of the athlete, I would 
quote from a newspaper account of a 
friendly visit once paid by a famous pugil- 
ist to the most famous of all pugilists in 
our generation. Robert Fitzsimmons had 
been informed that John L. Sullivan was 
ill ; whereupon he donned " a neat fitting 
frock coat and a glittering tall hat," and 
drove in a carriage to see him. He found 
him in bed ; " the once mighty gladiator 
had lost all of his old-time vim and vigor. 

*' The two great athletes were visibly 
affected. Sullivan raised himself on his 
elbow and looked steadily at Fitz for some 
few seconds. * How are you, John .? ' said 

[ 235 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

Fitz when the big fellow showed signs 
of relaxing his vice-like grip." 

John was depressed. " ' It 's Baden 
Springs, Hot Springs, or some other sul- 
phur bath for me. I never did believe 
much in medicine. This world is all a 
" con " any w^ay. Why, they talk about 
religion and heaven and hell. What do 
they know about heaven and hell ? I think 
when a guy croaks he just dies and that 's 
all there is to him. They bury some of 
them, but they won't plant me. When I 
go,' the big fellow faltered, * they '11 burn 
me. Nothin' left but your ashes, and each 
of your friends can have some of you to 
remember you by. Let them burn you 
up when you 're all in. It 's the proper 
thing.' " 

Fitzsimmons dissented from this view, 
and in his warm-hearted, optimistic way 
set about cheering up his dejected friend. 
He recalled their exploits and triumphs in 
the prize ring; and Sullivan was soon in 
a happier frame of mind. Oddly enough, 

[ 236 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

in this friendly call upon a sick man, Fitz- 
simmons was accompanied by a newspaper 
reporter and a photographer, — one of 
those chance occurrences which enrich 
the world. ** Sullivan noticed the camera 
which the photographer carried, and asked 
what it was for." Unsuspicious and un- 
worldly old man ! " He was told that the 
newspaper hoped to get a photograph of 
him and Fitz as they met, but that as he 
was abed of course such a thing was im- 
possible. 

" * Impossible ! No, I guess not, my boy. 
If there's any people I like to oblige, it 's 
the newspaper fellows. They will do more 
good for a man than all the preachers in 
creation.' " 

Fitzsimmons acquiesced. " And then 
the great John L. lifted himself to a sitting 
position and put his legs outside the bed. 

"That was the most pathetic incident 
of the visit. With fatherly care Bob Fitz- 
simmons placed his great right arm behind 
Sullivan's broad back and held him com- 

[ 237 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

fortably while the latter arranged himself. 
When everything was apparently ready, 
Fitz glanced down and noticed that a part 
of Sullivan's legs were uncovered, and the 
picture-taking operation had to be post- 
poned until the sympathetic Fitz had 
wrapped him carefully in the clothes. It 
was touching.'' 

Of course it waSc And if the ingenuous 
description fails to bring appropriate tears 
to the reader's eyes, it must at least reveal 
to him the simple charm of an egotism to 
which a reporter brings a more stimulating 
message than a preacher, and a venture- 
some photographer a more healing medi- 
cine than a physician. But transplant that 
egotism ; let it inhabit the soul of a cler- 
gyman, and where would be its simple 
charm ? 

-In "Fistiana," a volume belonging to 
the last century, there is a chapter entitled 
"Patriotic and Humane Character of the 
Boxing Fraternity." It is, no doubt, a 
tribute well deserved. **To the credit of 

[ 238 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

the professors of boxing they were never 
'backward in coming forward ' to aid the 
work of charity, or to answer those ap- 
peals to public sympathy which the rav- 
ages of war, the visitations of Providence, 
the distresses of trade and commerce, or 
the afflictions of private calamity fre- 
quently excited." Among the objects of 
their generous assistance are mentioned 
*' the starving Irish, the British prisoners in 
France, the Portuguese unfortunates, the 
suffering families of the heroes who had 
fallen and bled on the plains of Waterloo, 
the famishing weavers. . . . The gener- 
ous spirit which warmed the heart of a 
true British boxer shone forth with its 
sterling brilliancy; all selfishness was set 
aside; and no sooner was the standard of 
charity unfurled than every man who could 
wield a fist, from the oldest veteran to 
the youngest practitioner, rushed forward, 
anxious and ardent to evince the feelings 
of his soul and to lend his hand in the 
work of benevolence.'* 

[ 239 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

The reader of such a panegyric may 
indulge a brief regret that they who in 
youth devote themselves with success to 
athletics ever turn their attention to other 
matters. Only by continuing in that sim- 
ple and healthful occupation may they 
preserve untarnished the special charm 
which clings to heroes, the special ego- 
tism which is without offence. The Presi- 
dent of our country is favorably known 
under an informal appellation ; but even 
the most genial employment of that name 
diffuses no such affectionate intimacy and 
regard as are embraced in the variety of 
pet terms for a champion, — whether he 
is ^'old John," *^ John L.," and ''Sully," 
or " Bob " and '' Fitz." And had these 
champions taken into any other pursuit 
the characteristics which have endeared 
them to the world, — the same childlike 
and blatant egotism, the same sterile spirit 
of competition, — how little human kind- 
liness and popularity would they have 
enjoyed! 

[ 240 ] 



BRAWN AND CHARACTER 

It gratifies some of us to be pessimistic 
about brawn. The theory pleases us that 
to be conspicuously strong in youth is to 
be exposed to a temptation which lesser 
boys are spared, — a temptation to go 
through life competing instead of achiev- 
ing. It is true that some of this competi- 
tion will result in achievement ; it is true 
that achievement never results except from 
competition ; but it is not debatable that 
he will go farthest and achieve most whose 
eye is upon the work alone, who rejoices 
in the contest only as an incident of work, 
not as a matter memorable in itself. Only 
in that spirit does one come through un- 
dismayed, eager to press on, indifferent to 
the complacent backward look. Those 
men of brawn and sinew at whom we 
gazed spellbound in our earlier years, — 
perhaps it is harder for them to attain to 
this spirit than it was for Stevenson. 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S • A 



THE CLAMMER 



By WILLIAM JOHN HOPKINS 



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and reflecting in the form of a captivating conceit our 
longing for the fundamental realities of life and our 
slavery to all else that has been added thereto. It is 
confidently recommended to all sorts and conditions 
of readers." — Life^ New York. 



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MIFFLIN /-^Mn^ ^^^ 

& COMPANY fc\V-'^ NEW YORK 




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APR 20 1907 



